Fact-Checker: Housing shortage numbers still unproven

What is the state of the country’s housing shortage?

This has been the question at the centre of the Government’s proposed affordable housing plan that aims to build more than 500,000 new units in the next five years, funded by taxpayers.

During his budget speech mid this month, Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich said that the country needs more than 200,000 houses annually, more than are currently being built.

 “Access to adequate and affordable housing remains a key concern in Kenya,” he said. “It is estimated that the country’s urban centres face a shortage of 200,000 housing units annually and this shortage will rise to 300,000 units by the year 2020 on current policies. At the moment, only about 50,000 new housing units are being constructed every year.”

This claim has been made numerous times and dates back more than six years but nevertheless remains unproven.

The figure appears to have its origin in the 2009 housing and population census and has been relied on by both local and international researchers to cite Kenya’s lack of adequate housing.

The World Bank in its latest edition of the Kenya Economic Update focusing on housing relies on the same figure, adding that Kenya’s cumulative housing gap stands at two million units.

“This is because 244,000 housing units in different market segments are needed annually to keep up with demand while current production is less than 50,000 units,” explains the bank in part.

The 2009 national census put the total number of Kenyans at 38.6 million and the total number of households in the country at 8.7 million. The average number of members in each household was at 4.4 then.

With Kenya’s population growing by about one million people each year, this estimate of housing demand is achieved by dividing this figure by the average number of households to arrive at 227,000.

This estimate however overlooks several key factors including a slowdown in overall population growth, changing lifestyles in the past few years that have seen the number of members in the average household reduce as well as new housing and living arrangements made popular by the country’s real estate boom witnessed in the past two decades.

The housing gap is also harder to determine given the fact that the Government lacks a public database of the total number of existing housing units and additional ones built annually.

While the Government keeps records of new private residential developments in the country, the information lists the project in its entirety and overlooks individual housing units within the project.

The claim that Kenya requires 200,000 housing units each year is thus unproven.