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Residential land supply for affordable housing in Ethiopia: the political-economic challenges—evidence from three cities in Tigray province - Journal of Housing and the Built Environment

Ethiopia’s urban housing crisis is characterized by a 33% homeownership rate, a cohabitation rate of 11.7 households per housing unit, and rental housing prices uncorrelated with income and housing services. The land market, which has priced out first-quintile income residents at 68% income on the one hand, and the future cost of current underpriced land provided to housing cooperatives on the other, suggest that income unaffordability may not be an appropriate analytical perspective and metric to study residential land/housing issues. Unlike the normative price curve-based or market behavior analysis-based literature, this paper explores the housing crisis in Ethiopia from a positive analytical perspective. By analyzing pertinent policies and authoritative laws, conducting in-depth interviews, and analyzing land price data from three cities in the Tigray region, we have found that (i) the price of residential land in the sample cities is unaffordable for all income levels. (ii) The scarcity of residential land supply and its unaffordability stem primarily from the country’s political-economic context. The main problems are the constitutional recognition of housing as a form of social distribution and its secondary role in national development; the fact that property rights and political control over land are not evenly shared between the central and regional governments; the fact that urban residents are not properly represented in politics at both the national and regional levels; and the fact that there are differences in land rents between rural and urban areas, which makes it hard to get land for urban growth.