Anacláudia Rossbach - UN-Habitat at WES25

Saskia Reimann
3 days ago
3 min read

Anacláudia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat at 25th edition of WES

This article is written by Saskia Reimann, a WES 2026 student journalist and writer for PulseZ.

Especially when you become a student, it’s often the first time you find yourself in the middle of a room hunt. Suddenly, between your budget and the city you’re living in, you realise how many factors determine what it actually means to feel secure - even prosperous - in a place.

At the 25th Warwick Economics Summit, Anacláudia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, spoke about what is perhaps one of the most defining challenges of our time: the global housing crisis.

Context

While you might have thought that finding a flat in Paris during your Erasmus was hard, or that living in London feels nearly impossible, imagine the reality for many people in the Global South. According to United Nations data, in African cities around 50% of residents live in slums or informal settlements, while in Latin America, the figure stands at roughly 20% of the population.

By 2030, the UN estimates that nearly 3 billion people will be living in inadequate housing. More than 1 billion reside in informal settlements, around 300 million are homeless, and approximately 120 million are forcibly displaced. Closing this global housing gap would require the construction of around 96,000 homes every single day.

History

In Europe, after the Second World War, “the Marshall Plan supported the reconstruction of Europe” and was therefore “key for the economic recovery of Europe”. Housing became more than just shelter; under welfare policies, it turned into a state-supervised instrument to “boost” the economy, as Anacláudia Rossbach argued in her address.

However, according to her, this was not the case in the Global South, where rapid urbanisation, limited fiscal capacity and deep inequality contributed to the growth of informal settlements. Cities were simply not prepared for the speed and scale of migration.

She then pointed to the major rupture of 2008: the global financial crisis. From the 1980s onwards, housing policy had increasingly shifted towards liberalisation and the expansion of credit markets. Housing became more market-driven and heavily financialised - a development that ultimately reached its limits when the crisis unfolded.

UN-Habitat and #Housing2030

In response to this crisis, the United Nations, through UN-Habitat, aims to promote “a better urban future”. Active in more than 70 countries, the agency works on housing, land policy and post-disaster reconstruction, coordinating its global efforts from its headquarters in Nairobi and regional offices across Latin America, Asia, the Arab States and Africa. #Housing2030 is a joint initiative by UNECE, UN-Habitat and Housing Europe that promotes effective policies and practical solutions to ensure affordable, adequate and sustainable housing for all by 2030.

Learning from positive examples (Brazil, Vienna, Singapore)

But it’s not all bad, if we look at housing, there are also positive examples. As Anacláudia Rossbach pointed out, Brazil launched a large-scale housing programme that has delivered roughly 7 million homes since 2009. Housing was not just about providing shelter, it became a mechanism for poverty reduction, and a way to integrate informal settlements, with investments in infrastructure strengthening local economies and social mobility.

And Rossbach referred to Vienna, where approximately a quarter of the population lives in social housing. Vienna’s official social housing platform explains that the city’s municipal housing programme, which marked its 100th anniversary in 2020, emerged from severe post-war housing shortages and poor living conditions for the working class. Today, around 500,000 people live in municipal housing, making Vienna the largest municipal housing provider in Europe, with more than 220,000 flats managed by Wiener Wohnen. The model continues to focus on providing affordable, high-quality housing for broad segments of the population

Also there is the example of Singapore, which Rossbach described as a “great exception in terms of housing provision”, highlighting how the country used housing as a central strategy for national transformation and economic development. According to the Singapore government, the Housing & Development Board was set up in 1960 and, after introducing the Home Ownership for the People Scheme, now provides more than one million flats housing around 80% of resident households, with nine in ten of those residents owning their homes.

The three examples show that there are already tested ways of how tackling the housing crisis can actually look in practice. Or, as Anacláudia Rossbach put it when speaking about #Housing2030, “We still have five years to go, and there’s a lot that we can do.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Warwick Economics Summit.

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