By Isis Barei-Guyot, Tom Gillespie and Smith Ouma

On 4 November 2025 Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York City. The 34-year-old Democratic Socialist campaigned on the issue of urban affordability and took on the city’s political and real estate establishment by promising to build public housing and freeze rents.

Mamdani’s stunning victory indicates that housing affordability is emerging as a key political issue in the 21st century. This problem is not limited to high-status ‘global’ cities such as New York: the UN estimates that up to 3 billion people lack access to affordable housing worldwide. The scale of the global housing challenge may be daunting, but it is also an opportunity to do things differently. It is clear now that business-as-usual policies are no longer an option, and that bold and innovative responses are needed.

 It is in this spirit that the Global Development Institute (GDI) hosted an international workshop on social and affordable housing solutions on 5 November, a day after the New York mayoral election. This workshop brought together public officials and community organisations from Manchester and Nairobi to initiate a process of cross-city policy learning. In the process, it built on an established tradition of social movement exchanges between Kenya and the UK that GDI has supported since 2017.

Manchester and Nairobi are very different cities, and it would be misleading to pretend that their housing problems are of equal scale and nature. However, both cities share common challenges in terms of booming property markets, rising land and shelter costs, and shortages of social and affordable housing (see here and here for more background). Marginalised communities in both cities also share a deep commitment to co-producing evidence-based solutions for reducing disadvantage and increasing wellbeing. It is these commonalities that provide the foundation for cross-city learning to identify inclusive and sustainable solutions to the global housing affordability challenge.

In the morning, the focus was on state-led housing solutions. Representatives from the Government of Kenya shared details of their national Affordable Housing Programme. This ambitious initiative seeks to address the country’s annual deficit of 200,000 units through the mass construction of new social and affordable apartments targeting low- and middle-income groups respectively. The programme seeks to extend homeownership to these groups through a tenant purchase scheme that is funded through a payroll levy on all Kenyan workers.

Next, we learned about Manchester City Council’s local affordable housing strategy. While urban regeneration since the 1990s has been successful in generating growth in this post-industrial city, the process has also produced inequalities, particularly between the centre and surrounding neighbourhoods. In response, the Council has placed greater emphasis on using public resources such as state-owned land to build affordable homes, with 10,000 new units targeted by 2032.  

In the afternoon, the focus shifted to community-led housing solutions. First, Shack Dwellers International, Muungano wa Wanavijiji and Akiba Mashinani Trust discussed their participatory approach to addressing the shelter needs of Kenya’s informal settlement dwellers. This encompasses both in-situ upgrading in established settlements and new greenfield projects in peripheral areas. In both cases, low-income communities play a key role in co-designing housing units and reducing costs through contributing their labour, leveraging their collective savings, and building incrementally. These organisations expressed a strong desire to work closely with the Government of Kenya to scale up community-led housing development.

Finally, we learned about the work of the Manchester Social Housing Commission, a civil society initiative to co-produce policy proposals to scale up the construction of ecologically sustainable housing for social rent in the city. In addition to housing professionals, the Commission includes community members from various Manchester neighbourhoods. Community Commissioners shared their experiences of housing insecurity, isolation and displacement, and spoke to the significance of the Commission in giving them a voice in the policymaking process. Professional Commissioners also discussed the safety challenges associated with high-rise housing, and the importance of listening to and empowering residents to prevent disasters such as the Grenfell Fire.  

The diverse approaches discussed at the workshop were all motivated by a recognition that housing production can no longer be left to the market alone. Rather, the extent of the challenge necessitates state intervention to produce social and affordable housing at scale. However, it is also clear that the state-led initiatives must involve communities and capitalise on their expertise to ensure that housing is safe, affordable and meets the needs and aspirations of residents. As such, there is a pressing need for innovative institutional arrangements that combine state resources with community knowledge in order to address the global urban housing challenge.  

 

 

Note:  This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole

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