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PetitHaus: Innovative housing solution that helps low/medium income earners access affordable, highly efficient qualitative living with convenience and unparalleled cost effectiveness.
Affordable Homeownership
SNEAK PEEK
A house is never just a house. It is the visible product of an invisible network of policies, infrastructure, economics, and human choices all working together (or failing together).
In this first episode of the Back to First Principles series, we unpack the housing ecosystem and why thinking in systems, not symptoms, is the first step toward real solutions.
If you’ve ever wondered why housing in Nigeria feels perpetually out of reach, you’re not alone. Many assume the problem begins and ends with costs: the price of land, building materials, or interest rates. But if you take a closer look, you’ll see something deeper: a systemic imbalance in how housing itself is built, not just physically, but structurally.
You see, a home doesn’t exist in isolation. It sits inside an ecosystem, a web of interdependent elements that determine whether owning or building a house is realistic, sustainable, and rewarding.
Let’s unpack that system from its foundation up.
To visualize this, think of the housing, construction, mortgage, and the entire real estate market as a building, one with a foundation, pillars, and a roof.
This conceptual framework, adapted from the work of El-Hadj and colleagues on Housing Market Dynamics in Africa, helps simplify what is otherwise a deeply complex system.
Every building begins with a foundation. In housing systems, that foundation is government and governance: the policies, laws, institutions, and security frameworks that make housing possible (or impossible).
When the foundation is weak, when land registration takes years, when building approvals depend on “connections,” when infrastructure isn’t planned alongside development… Even the best housing ideas crumble.
“Government” isn’t just a regulator; it’s the base that holds the weight of everything above. And this foundation determines whether the entire system stands firm or falls apart.
Above the foundation sit five interconnected pillars. If any one of these collapses, the rest begin to wobble.
Each pillar relies on the others. Affordable housing fails when one is overburdened or ignored. You can’t talk about “cheap houses” without addressing how power supply, road access, or land titles inflate their cost.
At the top of it all is the financial sector, the “roof” of this structure. Banks, microfinance institutions, investment firms, and housing funds form the canopy under which capital circulates.
But here’s the catch: the roof only holds if the pillars beneath it are strong. When the foundation (governance) is unstable, when infrastructure lags, or when construction costs rise uncontrollably, the financial system retreats, seeing housing as too risky to finance.
That’s why the flow of housing finance feels like a trickle rather than a stream. The structure beneath it is simply too shaky to hold.
Every few months, new data headlines say the same thing: “The economy is growing.” GDP is up. Inflation is “stabilizing.” Progress is “on track.” Yet, for the average Nigerian, the reality tells a different story. Because when a bag of rice still costs more than it used to, “economic growth” becomes hard to believe.
And the same disconnect plays out in housing.
Despite genuine government efforts to improve access to affordable homes, most of these projects still end up priced far above what the people they were designed for can afford. The intent is noble, but the impact rarely lands because policies and projects are often built on averages, not realities.
Once policymakers step into office, their language changes. People stop being Peter and Aisha, and start becoming data points, aggregated into GDP, employment figures, and generic “housing demand” metrics. And when solutions are designed for averages, they almost never fit anyone.
That’s why interventions in housing often struggle: the middle class and low-income earners don’t share the same realities, yet they’re often treated the same. Meanwhile, cost drivers like land pricing, financing, and infrastructure gaps remain unresolved, leaving affordability out of reach.
But here’s the thing: housing, like most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), doesn’t exist in isolation. You can’t fix housing without fixing income. You can’t fix income without fixing industry. And you can’t fix industry without collaboration between government, private players, and citizens.
Nigeria’s housing conversation often gets trapped in first-order questions: “Should I buy or build?” “How can I afford rent?” “Why is cement so expensive?” But these are symptoms, not systems.
When we focus on surface-level problems, we miss the deeper truth that affordability isn’t a number; it’s a function of structure. The integrity of housing depends on how strong and synchronized the system beneath it is.
If we rebuild our understanding of housing from first principles, starting with governance, then the pillars, and finance, we’ll begin to see why solutions that ignore the system keep failing. Affordable housing isn’t about cheapness; it’s about coherence. About a working system where governance, infrastructure, and finance all align to make quality living attainable for more people.
In the next episode of this series, we’ll unpack one of the biggest sources of misunderstanding in this ecosystem—the role of government—and why defining who affordable housing is for might be the most important step toward solving it
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