GlobalEconomicSince 2000Curatedmedium confidence

Housing Affordability and Homelessness

Shelter has become unaffordable across most of the urban world.

Severity score

48.7

Serious · default weighting

Trajectory

Worsening

What this is

Housing costs have outpaced incomes in most major cities, pushing up homelessness, overcrowding and informal settlement. Over a billion people live in slums or inadequate housing, with direct consequences for health, education and disaster vulnerability.

Score breakdown

Loss of life

24

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

84

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

64

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

10

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

62

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.