Effects of COVID-19 on Urban Housing Delivery and Affordability in Nigeria

Abstract

The world economy has been experiencing serious disruption due to the advent of COVID-19 pandemic impacting at both local and global scales. Inquiries, studies and researches are currently ongoing to analyse the impacts COVID-19 has on various sectors of the economy so as to enable stakeholders in policy making understand and come up with adequate plans to develop resilience to the pandemic and ensure sustainability of the several affected sectors in the economy. Housing is one of the fundamental needs of man and has no doubt been affected by the advent of COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the aspect of housing need, space requirement, housing security, housing affordability and security of tenure, housing/property investment and construction. This study reviews various existing studies on the current effects and potential impact of COVID-19 pandemic on different facets of urban housing, and its effects on urban housing delivery and affordability, with a view to identifying fissures or gaps as well as filling the identified gaps and create platform for further studies and contribution to knowledge and academic research. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses was adopted with a total of 140 documents retrieved and 79 eliminated using adopted criteria leaving out 61, out of which 30 not addressing subject matter in the study area were excluded from findings; thus, 33 documents including PhD dissertations, MSc. thesis, peer reviewed journal articles, books, proceedings, technical reports and other published articles directly relevant to this paper work were succinctly reviewed. Results show COVID-19 has impacted housing need, space requirement, housing security, housing affordability, real estate investment and housing development. The study also shows that residential, hospitality, retail, offices, industrial and healthcare sectors have different experiences of COVID-19 impact as some are positive like in the case of industrial and healthcare while others are negative.