Let’s make this new year a truly happy one, through seeking and implementing fresh approaches to addressing key challenges for our built environment, that benefit Ghana.
One huge challenge is the housing shortage, estimated by the housing minister at 2 million and by the Ghana Real Estate Development association at close to 6 million.
Such figures are compiled by trying to compare the number of housing units people desire with what they actually have – evidently not an easy task given the huge differences in the figures quoted by these knowledgeable sources.
Beyond practical measurement challenges in quantifying the housing shortage, there is a conceptual difficulty: we don’t speak of a shortage of motor cars because there are many who would like a motor car but don’t have one, or have one but not the one they would like. Similarly, with housing, it’s not just what housing each of us might desire, but what we have a potential opportunity to acquire that should be counted as economically effective demand. Yet most of us feel that in a healthy society, everyone should have at least a chance to choose to live in reasonable accommodation with dignity, even if they cannot have the car – or indeed the house – they would ideally like.
We need to analyse both demand and supply issues for housing. We need to understand where demand can be expressed in more effective ways (for example through increased availability of mortgages, or shifting demand for housing towards areas where it can be more easily and cheaply supplied); and where supply can effectively be increased (for example by adjusting the utility companies supply charging structures to make construction of low and medium price housing more economically attractive to developers than at present). And of course, demand and supply issues interact and so need to be considered together.
Behind these statistics and economic dynamics is much difficulty, even suffering, endured by millions of Ghanaians due to their living conditions. Many have no stable place of abode, live in severely over-crowded conditions, spend the majority of their day commuting on crowded tra-tras because it takes so long to travel from somewhere they can live to somewhere they can work or study, or suffer from the absence of water or electricity at the property they live in. It is to our collective shame that so little progress has been made over decades to address these serious problems, and we must not just give up on this.
Many of the issues that need to be addressed to help improve the operation of housing demand and supply are well known, albeit they have proved difficult to solve. They include improving our land acquisition and registration system and reducing the friction often amounting to years of wasted time before development can even start; facilitating the feeble mortgage market so that many more Ghanaians can access finance to acquire housing; enabling alternatives for efficient provision of utilities to give choice and greater availability in more areas to developers and buyers; enforcing our planning system more rigorously so building is done in suitable locations, to the right standards, and coordinated with provision of wider infrastructure; avoiding the ridiculous waste of resources arising from stopping housing schemes started by previous governments whenever a new party comes to power, and so on.
I will add two less frequently discussed issues to this list.
First, the need for greater taxation of capital gains on land and building value increases, to reduce the attractions of holding on to undeveloped or under-developed land and simply waiting for prices to rise whilst doing nothing to make the land more useful.
Second, the technical and cultural barriers which mean that our desperate housing shortage is happening alongside a glut of under-occupied houses, often with just an elderly couple or single person inhabiting them.
Addressing these two issues could go a long way towards solving our housing crisis at relatively low financial cost. However, to properly unpack them needs more space that is possible within the bounds of this column, and I hope to return to them in the future.
Coming bank to the wider question of tackling the challenge of housing need, architects can play a key role as facilitators of a common agenda and united pressure for change from relevant built environment professional groups (analogous to the individual architect’s role in coordinating diverse professionals to carry out a building project). Architects could even form a vanguard for movements of civil society and individual citizens addressing wider built environment concerns, by helping pinpoint and publicise the questions that all should be asking, and the actions that would be most effective from a professionally informed perspective in solving agreed challenges.
And now is the time to act! Architects and other built environment professionals must seize the golden opportunity of an election year to promote worthwhile debate that is informed by technical knowledge and practical experience. They can encourage a context that elicits appropriate commitments from the political parties by playing the election game smartly.
For example, there needs to be a deeper diagnosis of the ills of our land tenure and registration system, going beyond simply talking of digitisation (desirable though digitisation is) towards identifying specific changes in our currently broken processes and incentives, and how these can be brought about. Professionals need to agree on key specific actions to deliver change, and create a context that elicits greater accountability from our leaders.
Specifically, architects could orchestrate, with other built environment professionals, a public platform where political parties are challenged to respond to specific politically neutral and technically identified policy recommendations, on the record. This needs to be done early, ahead of manifestos being fixed, so influence can be maximised. This platform should also challenge relevant institutions on what part they should play in driving change. The platform should be webcast and video recorded, as well as having journalists and public present, to assist in holding political parties more accountable against the statements they make in response to the challenges put forward by built environment institutions, once one of parties has been elected to power.
If architects play their part in encouraging more effective civil society engagement with political parties on a major challenge such as the housing shortage, they will at the same time achieve something even more important: helping to build the culture of greater accountability from and engagement with our leaders, that we – and they – so need, for Ghana’s good. But time is short to influence the platform of next government, of whichever party that turns out to be. If architects are to build the necessary alliances with other professions, and achieve support for the sort of engagement sessions with politicians and institutions that I have suggested above, in time to influence key ideas in party manifestos, action is urgent.
Here’s to a future for Ghana in 2020 and beyond where architects play that positive role, alongside many others, in ensuring the country develops in a sustainable and professionally informed way, that benefits all its citizens. It’s a future that is within the built environment professions’ collective grasp, if they have the will to make this happen.
Henry Abraham is a social entrepreneur, Managing Director of HJA Africa, suppliers of a highly cost-effective organic fertiliser, pesticide and fungicide, and formerly Head of Transport and Economic Development for London.