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By the year 2030, an additional 3 billion people, about 40 percent of the world’s population, will need access to housing. This translates into a demand for 96,150 new affordable units every day and 4,000 every hour.

One out of every three city dwellers – nearly a billion people – lives in a slum. Slum indicators include: lack of water, lack of sanitation, overcrowding, non-durable structures and insecure tenure.

Because of poor living conditions, women living in slums are more likely to contract HIV/AIDS than their rural counterparts, and children in slums are more likely to die from water-borne and respiratory illness.

Housing formation generates non-housing related expenditures that help drive the economy.

Investing in housing expands the local tax base. Each year 35.1 million new housing units are needed to house the urban population growth between now and 2030. This does not include replacements of deteriorated and substandard housing stocks.

In 2007, the world’s urban population outnumbered the rural for the first time.

Almost 180,000 people are added to the urban population each day.

95 percent of the world population growth in the next decades will occur in the urban areas of developing countries.

The poor are urbanizing faster than the population as a whole, reflecting a lower than average pace of urban poverty reduction.

Substandard housing, unsafe water and poor sanitation in densely populated cities are responsible for 10 million deaths worldwide every year.

Latin America is the most urbanized region in the world, with 75 percent of its population living in cities. According to the United Nations, 27 percent of these urban residents—more than 117 million people—suffer from precarious housing conditions, living without adequate sanitation, with irregular or no electricity supply and without adequate security.

Raising awareness and advocating for change are the first steps toward transforming systems that perpetuate the global plague of poverty housing. World Habitat Day serves as an important reminder that everyone must unite to ensure that everyone has a safe, decent place to call home.  Please advocate for adequate housing on World Habitat Day and throughout the month of October.

Nairobi, Kenya
With an estimated population of more than one million people, Kibera is the largest slum in all of Africa.
© Habitat for Humanity/Steffan Hacker

My Tho, Vietnam
Houses crowd the banks of the Mekong River.
© Habitat for Humanity/Ezra Millstein

Armavir, Armenia
Ellada Manasyan and her three young children live in this deserted and crumbling Soviet-era building.
© Habitat for Humanity/Ezra Millstein

San Salvador, El Salvador
A young boy plays in front of his family’s shack, in the Las Victorias squatter community on the outskirts of San Salvador.
© Habitat for Humanity/Ezra Millstein

Goiania, Brazil
Favela dos Trilhos.
© Habitat for Humanity/Ezra Millstein

Sources: UN-Habitat, Kissick et al 2006

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