A massive new UN-Habitat report unveiled this week in Baku, Azerbaijan, presents a radical reframing of the global housing crisis: instead of yet another alarm bell, it offers proof that practical, community-centered solutions already exist—and work. Released at the 13th World Urban Forum, the 300-page World Cities Report 2026: The Global Housing Crisis – Pathways to Action documents not only the scale of the challenge but the pathways forward, grounding its argument in real examples from Thailand to Brazil to Jordan.
The scope of the problem is staggering. Up to 3.4 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate housing, while more than 1.1 billion live in informal settlements and slums. Yet rather than presenting housing as an intractable crisis requiring displacement and demolition, UN-Habitat Executive Director Anacláudia Rossbach frames it differently: "Adequate housing represents one of the most powerful entry points for accelerating sustainable and inclusive development." This shift in perspective—treating housing as a human right and engine for development rather than a market commodity—underlies the report's most compelling case studies.
Thailand's Baan Mankong programme stands as the flagship example. Instead of relocating residents from informal settlements, the initiative provides infrastructure funding and supports collective land agreements, enabling communities to improve their housing in place. The programme demonstrates that informal settlements need not be viewed as failures of urban development but as neighborhoods deserving investment and respect. The report acknowledges challenges—poorer communities sometimes struggle to meet savings requirements—but the model has proven durable enough to influence policy across the region.
In Amman, Jordan, a different intervention illustrates how housing solutions can bridge humanitarian and development work. Near the Al-Hussein refugee camp, authorities rehabilitated a large open space into a climate-resilient, age-responsive park designed to ease tensions between displaced populations and host communities while improving living conditions for all, with particular attention to the needs of women and girls. By the end of 2024, more than 123 million people had been forcibly displaced globally by conflict, violence, and persecution—a sobering figure that underscores why the UN sees its role as connecting emergency response to long-term urban planning.
Brazil's favela programmes show perhaps the starkest pivot away from the failures of the past. For decades, eviction and slum clearance deepened poverty and social exclusion. Today, "in situ upgrading" has taken hold—improving roads, sanitation, drainage, and housing conditions without displacing residents. The results vary by place: housing improvements in São Paulo, drainage projects in Recife, a cable car constructed in Rio de Janeiro's Complexo do Alemão. Each solution is tailored to the neighborhood's specific needs.
The report calls for greater political priority through the New Urban Agenda, an action-oriented framework adopted in 2016 that sets global standards for urban planning and advances the urban dimensions of the Sustainable Development Goals. UN-Habitat's role, it argues, extends beyond sounding alarms to helping governments develop housing policies, promote housing as a human right, coordinate international cooperation, support climate-resilient urban planning, and back community-led upgrading projects. The message is clear: solving the housing crisis is not simply a technical problem. It requires treating displaced and informal-settlement residents not as temporary outsiders but as urban residents entitled to services, jobs, and safe housing—and empowering communities to lead the solutions themselves.