The world is running out of time to deliver on its promise of sustainable cities and communities, a new United Nations report has warned, painting a stark picture of a global housing crisis that is undermining progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) with barely four years left before the 2030 deadline.
The SDG 11 Global Report 2026, launched by UN-Habitat during the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) in New York on Thursday 9th July 2026, found that more than 3 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate housing, including over 1.1 billion who live in informal settlements and slums.
Prepared jointly with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UNDRR, WHO, UNODC, UNESCO, UNEP and other partners, the report represents the UN system’s collective assessment of a goal that, ten years after its adoption, remains dangerously off track.
Presenting the findings at UN Headquarters, UN-Habitat Executive Director Anacláudia Rossbach did not mince words about the scale of the challenge.
She described the delivery of adequate housing and the transformation of slums and informal settlements as one of the clearest tests of whether the world is truly achieving SDG 11’s vision of sustainable cities. With only four years remaining until 2030, and the New Urban Agenda itself reaching its midpoint, she stressed that the moment calls for urgency rather than gradual gains.
That sense of alarm was echoed by Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Erastus Ekitela Lokaale, who addressed the press briefing on behalf of one of the countries most directly grappling with rapid urbanisation and a widening housing deficit.
He noted that despite pockets of progress in public transport, waste management and urban policy the world remains significantly off course on SDG 11 and underlined that housing functions as an enabler not just of Goal 11, but of the entire 2030 Agenda.
A further, more personal warning came from Shirley Pryce of the Jamaica Household Workers Union, GROOTS Jamaica, and the Huairou Commission, who sits on UN-Habitat’s Advisory Group on Gender Issues. She reminded the briefing that the billions of people living in inadequate housing are not abstract figures but families whose lives are shaped daily by exclusion and inequality, and called for the lived experiences of women and caregivers to be placed at the centre of urban planning rather than treated as an afterthought.
The report does credit real, measurable progress. Across 126 countries, the share of urban residents with convenient access to public transport rose from 53.2 per cent in 2020 to 61.5 per cent in 2025. In 123 countries, urban land consumption is beginning to track more closely with population growth, a sign that planning is improving in some places. Municipal solid waste collection now exceeds 90 per cent across several regions, including Northern America, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
But the report is blunt that these advances are being outpaced by the sheer speed and scale of urbanisation and by inequalities widening within cities themselves. Four in ten urban residents still lack convenient access to public transport.
Disasters, whose frequency continues to climb, affected an average of 123 million people every year between 2015 and 2024. And affordability pressures are mounting globally: half of all households now spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent.
Data gaps compound the problem. While 101 countries now report on more than half of the monitoring indicators across SDG 11’s ten targets, up sharply since 2020, the report flags persistent blind spots in disaggregating data on women, children, persons with disabilities, informal settlement residents and neighbourhood-level inequality. Without better statistics, geospatial data and earth observation tools, the report warns, governments will struggle to target investment where it is needed most.
Kenya’s intervention at the briefing lands against the backdrop of the country’s own high-stakes bet on housing as a development lever.
Since the Affordable Housing Act was signed into law in 2024, Nairobi has mobilised over Ksh. 170 billion cumulatively through the mandatory Housing Levy, and more than 1.1 million Kenyans have registered on the Boma Yangu platform, more than double the figure recorded a year earlier. Government figures indicate that 111,975 units have been completed or are under development through the Affordable Housing Programme, part of a wider pipeline that industry estimates put at over 262,000 units under development across all 47 counties.
The programme’s headline moments have included the handover of homes at the New Mukuru estate in Nairobi’s Embakasi South, where President William Ruto handed over keys to more than 4,500 families in December and government claims that the initiative has generated employment for hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, with 572,000 jobs projected for 2026, building on 480,000 positions filled by December 2025.
Yet the gap between ambition and delivery, the very dynamic the UN report warns about globally, is visible in Kenya’s own numbers. Against an annual target of 200,000 to 250,000 units, delivery has repeatedly fallen short: one review found that only 2,075 units were completed between July 2022 and June 2025, just 0.8 per cent of the annual target, while separate Kenya National Bureau of Statistics data recorded far fewer completions than presidential announcements have claimed, fuelling scrutiny over the pace of implementation.
Financing remains a central constraint too, with analysts pointing to an annual shortfall of roughly Sh. 326 billion against the Sh. 400 billion needed to deliver 250,000 units a year.
It is precisely this pattern genuine institutional progress (a housing law, a dedicated fund, a national digital registration platform) running up against the raw scale of demand and financing gaps, that mirrors the UN-Habitat report’s central warning: that without a dramatic acceleration, commitments made for 2030 risk being only partially met.
The report’s overarching argument is that housing should be understood not as one outcome among many, but as the foundation on which the rest of the SDGs rest.
Prioritising adequate housing and transforming informal settlements, it argues, can drive progress simultaneously on poverty eradication, health, education, gender equality, climate resilience and economic opportunity, making it one of the highest-leverage investments governments can make with the time that remains.
The findings will feed directly into deliberations at the HLPF and into the High-Level Meeting of the UN General Assembly on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, scheduled for 16 and 17 July 2026, a meeting that will test whether the urgency voiced in New York translates into faster, better-financed action on the ground, in Kenya and across the world’s fastest-urbanising regions.
