Review of Housing Strategies for the Affordable Housing Estate-park Road, Ngara

Abstract

According to the United Nations, the world became over half urban around 2007, and is projected to be 66% urban by 2050 thereby making urbanization one of the most definitive trends of the twenty-first century. As a result, development of cities and urban areas has now taken the center stage in global development. Of critical importance is the development of adequate housing broadly defined as housing that is affordable, habitable, accessible, culturally appropriate and safe. It also focusses on bridging of the quantitative gap between the high demand resulting from rapid urbanization and low supply especially in less developed countries. The drivers of these shifts include international instruments to which many countries are signatories and include the New Urban Agenda whose focus is on the correlation between development and good urbanization as well as the 11th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 11) that advocates for inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable human settlements. As the need for adequate housing gets more pressing globally and with affordability challenges becoming increasingly dire by the day, governments, Kenya included, are getting involved in direct provision of housing, otherwise referred to as public housing. Shihembetsa(2005) notes that public housing, located within a radius of 6km of the CBD which falls within inner city areas, remains the cheapest in terms of rent hence its dominance over private housing. This explains the pressure that is felt in inner city areas where much of public housing which is deemed affordable is domiciled. The Government of Kenya has since 2017 given priority to affordable housing by listing it among the four priority agenda, further underpinning the GoK’s commitment to ensure affordability of public housing. This initiative has been carried on by the new government regime. In the AHP, the GoK put in place strategies to ensure that housing developed would be adequate, and with the aim to facilitate ownership of homes for ownership by the lower income groups who would otherwise not be able to purchase houses in the open market. Key among the strategies was and remains GoK’s commitment to provide public land and bulk infrastructure for development of public housing, with the delivery model being joint ventures and public-private partnerships with private entities. The pilot project for the AHP was the affordable housing estate in Ngara, whose strategies revolved around economic, social and environmental themes. This study sought to establish the strategies deployed by GoK in the (re)development of housing within Nairobi’s inner city areas and to examine their effectiveness in meeting the needs of housing within the said areas using the case of the affordable housing estate. The findings were then used to propose strategies that could bear the greatest benefit to all stakeholders involved in urban redevelopment within inner city areas.