Stakeholders in the built environment have attributed the rising cost of housing deficits to include urban migration and the cost of registration of title documents among others.
The stakeholders’ position arising from a random sampling conducted by the Daily Sun on the increasing housing deficit in the country agreed that cost of raw materials in the building industry with over 60 percent still being imported results in acute housing shortages.
The cause of this growing housing shortage also grew from a simple to a more complex problem, they agreed. In 1991, mortgage inefficiency was the sole cause of the housing shortage in the country. While this remained, other factors pulled their weight to create a more complex problem. They agreed that additional factors which helped in making housing deficits insurmountable abound.
According to Mrs Folake Odunsanyo, a property developer in Amuwo-Odofin in Festac area of Lagos, the additional factors are urban expansion, over-population, slum demolition, increasing poverty, urban migration, cost of land, high cost of registration of title registration, cost of construction, cost of materials, cost of labour, cost of fund, land grabbers syndrome among other factors. “This is due to a number of factors, including the devaluation of the naira, inflation, and the overall increase in the cost of living.
The good news is that there are ways to cope with the increased cost of building materials. This is only if the government could leverage the local content and discourage the importation of certain building materials and crash the price of cement and other materials that are produced locally. They should encourage local manufacturers of building materials by incentives and less taxes,” she stated.
According to Paulo Mandiro, in charge of plastic plates in a plastic manufacturing company, in Jos, Plateau State, the cost of building materials has been on the rise in Nigeria for the past years and the problems continue to increase because of government’s failure to combat it.
He said, “The price of cement, among many other building materials, has been on a consistent rise in Nigeria, with no end in sight for a possible reduction. “In fact, there has been a major increase in the prices of building materials, and this has also affected the prices of housing units being produced by the government and developers,” he opined.