UN World Cities Report 2026 Flags Global Housing Crisis; India Faces Sharp Affordability Gap

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) has released its World Cities Report 2026, titled “The Global Housing Crisis: Pathways to Action”, at the Thirteenth World Urban Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan. The report says about 3.4 billion people — four out of every ten people in the world — currently lack access to adequate housing. More than a billion of these live in informal settlements such as slums, the highest figure ever recorded.

A household is considered “housing stress-burdened” if it spends more than 30 per cent of its income on housing. Globally, 44 per cent of households already cross this threshold for rent alone. The report uses the house price-to-income ratio for home-buyers — housing is treated as affordable when median house price is no more than three times median household income, while ratios above five indicate severe unaffordability. Central and Southern Asia, including India, have seen one of the sharpest rises in the price-to-income ratio in recent years.

The report flags the “financialisation” of housing — where homes are treated primarily as investment assets rather than places to live — as a major driver of unaffordability. It calls for stronger public investment in social and rental housing, regulation of speculative real-estate practices, planning that integrates land use with transport, and recognition of housing as a human right under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

For exam aspirants, the report connects with India’s schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) — Urban and Gramin, the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) initiative, the Smart Cities Mission, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), and Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities).