Nearly half of city residential houses are in a poor state.
Despite Kigali’s discernible expansion in most aspects over the recent past, housing remains one of the visibly challenging realities that the city dwellers currently slightly above one million continue to face.
The cost of housing in the City of Kigali (CoK) far exceeds other needs, such as transport and food but the quality of most houses remains poor compared to their cost especially those available for rent.
The insanely high cost of housing rises from the limited number of houses in relatively good conditions, hence leaving city dwellers with no choice but to reside in costly places even when the houses are poor and do not give value for the money spent.This reality was one of the pointers highlighted by a survey that was released on the October 25 by the Kigali city council, in which it was identified that 48.8% of the 223,000 existing houses or 108,803 units are in poor conditions and thus need to be replaced with better ones while 71,487 houses, or 32.1% of the existing houses are in demand of upgrading in order for them to be fit for providing the human basic need of shelter. Apparently, below 20% of the houses in the city are in good condition.
“There are still very many people living in poor housing facilities. But now that we have the details of the situation and how much we need to do in order to change it, we believe that half of the job is done and the rest will also be possibly accomplished,” Kigali City mayor Fidele Ndayisaba voiced his expectations.According to the study, Kigali needs 350,000 house units between 2012 and 2022 in order for the city dwellers from different classes of incomes to be housed. However, about 78% of the demanded houses that the city requires to fill the existing housing gap should be built for the class of households earning a monthly Rwf300, 000 and below.
“This is where the challenge lies because many of the developers in the city have put more of the emphasis on building for the premium class which is more profitable,” highlights Marco Antonio Cuevas Juarez, the architect who was behind the survey.
Marco says that the challenge of ensuring Kigali residents and later on Rwanda in general access affordable but good quality housing, calls for the efforts of both the public and private sectors but the former ought to invest more efforts.
“If these required housing units are to be achieved, beyond everything, it calls for the efforts of the government not only in directly investing in construction of the houses but also packaging and marketing the investment opportunity to the private sector to boost activity in the sector,” Marco further notes.