The fact that sustainable mass housing is needed to provide decent shelter for more than 1.6 billion of the world’s poorest people — or about one-fifth of the global population — is one that the development community has known for years.
There have been efforts to address the problem, from long-standing declarations and agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to national policies that put the need for decent shelters at the core. Shelter-focused nongovernmental organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, have been trying to provide decent housing to poor people in low-income countries as well.
But despite widespread recognition and intention to address the global housing gap, the reality is that there is not enough money to build all of these houses.