Pricing young people out of the housing market

Namibia’s housing crisis is no longer simply about the shortage of houses. It is about the growing distance between what homes cost and what ordinary Namibians can earn.

For a young Namibian entering the labour market today, the dream of owning a home increasingly resembles a financial fantasy.

The problem is not necessarily that young people do not want to own property. Nor is it simply that banks are unwilling to lend.

The more fundamental problem is that the housing market has moved so far beyond the income levels of ordinary households that even people with jobs are finding themselves locked out.

Namibia is therefore facing a housing paradox: the country needs hundreds of thousands of additional homes, yet the homes being produced by the formal market are increasingly unaffordable to the very people who need them.

The Bank of Namibia recently described affordability as the core challenge facing the housing sector.

Its latest assessment puts the weighted average house price at approximately N$1.44 million in the first quarter of 2026, while about 75% of workers earn less than N$5 000 a month.

That should force a much more uncomfortable national conversation.

Who exactly are we building houses for?

And perhaps even more importantly: what does homeownership mean for a generation whose salaries cannot keep pace with the cost of land, construction and housing finance?

Recent affordability figures illustrate the problem starkly. In the second quarter of 2026, the average house price was reported at approximately N$1.46 million.

A household would require an income of roughly N$43 765 a month to qualify for financing for a house at that price.

That is not the income of the average young Namibian.

It is therefore reasonable to argue that Namibia’s housing crisis has evolved from a shortage crisis into an access crisis.

There simply are not enough houses. But even where houses exist, there are not enough houses at prices compatible with the incomes of the majority.

This distinction is crucial.

For decades, the language surrounding housing has been dominated by numbers: housing backlogs, houses delivered, plots serviced, programmes launched and billions allocated.

But a house is not necessarily affordable simply because it has been built.

A serviced plot is not necessarily accessible simply because it has been allocated.

And a housing programme cannot be judged entirely by the number of units constructed if the people for whom the programme was supposedly intended cannot afford to occupy them.

Namibia’s official housing policy itself acknowledges the fundamental problem.

The government has recognised that limited supply of serviced land and formal housing has contributed to rising prices, particularly in urban areas, forcing many households into informal settlements.

The numbers tell their own story.

The National Housing Enterprise has estimated Namibia’s housing backlog at around 300 000 units.

A recent affordability assessment estimated that clearing that backlog could require roughly N$76 billion.

Meanwhile, the ministry of urban and rural development has set a target of servicing 10 000 plots annually until 2029/30.

But during the 2024/25 reporting period, only 1 772 plots were reportedly fully serviced, with another 1 064 partially serviced. That means fully serviced plots amounted to less than one-fifth of the annual target.

This is where the political rhetoric around housing collides with economic reality.

Namibians have heard promises of affordable houses and serviced land for years. Governments have launched programmes, announced targets and repeatedly acknowledged the urgency of the crisis.

Yet the gap remains.

Indeed, research published in 2025 found that Namibia’s previous Mass Housing Development

Programme delivered only a fraction of its original ambitions, while the programme ultimately closed in 2015 amid problems including tendering irregularities.

The lesson should not simply be that the government failed to build enough houses.

The deeper lesson is that the model of housing delivery matters.

A government can spend billions and still fail to solve the affordability problem if the land is expensive, infrastructure is expensive, construction is expensive and financing is designed around households with relatively high and stable incomes.

This is particularly devastating for young Namibians.

A young professional earning a respectable salary may still find himself or herself competing for a property market structured around incomes considerably higher than their own.

A young teacher, nurse, journalist, police officer, civil servant or entrepreneur may have a job, but that job does not necessarily translate into the financial capacity to buy a house.

And the problem begins before the house is constructed.

It begins with land.

Land in urban Namibia is not simply dirt.

Once land has to be surveyed, planned, serviced, connected to water and electricity, provided with roads and sewerage, and transferred through an administrative and legal system, its cost rises substantially.

The result is that the young Namibian is effectively entering the property market at the end of a long

and expensive value chain.

By the time a plot becomes available for purchase, it may already be too expensive.

Then comes construction.

Recent estimates put the cost of materials for a standard three-bedroom house at between roughly N$301 000 and N$380 000, while land prices have reportedly increased substantially depending on the region.

Then comes the bank. Then interest.

Then municipal charges. Then rates and taxes. Then maintenance. The dream of a home becomes a multi-decade financial obligation.

This is why the housing debate cannot be separated from the broader question of income inequality and economic opportunity.

If wages stagnate while land and housing costs rise, the market will inevitably exclude more people.

The International Monetary Fund has similarly identified structural factors behind Namibia’s housing prices, pointing to demographic change, urbanisation and shortages of serviced land as important drivers of unmet demand and rising land and housing costs.

Urbanisation is not going to stop.

Young people will continue moving towards Windhoek and other urban centres in search of employment, education and opportunity.

The question is whether Namibia will continue responding to urbanisation primarily after people have already arrived, or whether it will plan for the cities those people will inhabit.

The growth of informal settlements is partly an expression of this failure. People do not move into informal settlements because they necessarily prefer informal housing.

They move there because the formal market has failed to provide an affordable alternative. That distinction is important.

An informal settlement is often treated as a problem of land occupation. But it can equally be understood as the market’s response to exclusion.

When a worker cannot afford a formal house, cannot access affordable serviced land and cannot qualify for a mortgage, that person does not disappear.

They find somewhere else to live. And increasingly that means informal housing.

Research comparing different housing approaches in Namibia has produced an important lesson: upgrading existing informal settlements can be considerably more cost-effective than constructing conventional formal housing for low-income households.

The research found that in-situ upgrading, particularly where it improves services and tenure security, can be the lowest-cost approach.

This should challenge the obsession with the traditional idea that solving the housing crisis means giving everyone a conventional three-bedroom house.

Perhaps Namibia needs to broaden its definition of a house. Secure tenure matters. Water matters. Sanitation matters. Electricity matters. Road access matters. A serviced plot matters. A starter home matters. A room that can be expanded over time matters.

For many young households, the first home does not have to be the final home.

The policy failure may therefore lie partly in trying to deliver the finished product to people who need an affordable pathway into homeownership.

There are already examples of alternative approaches.

Community-led housing initiatives, savings schemes and incremental construction have demonstrated that lower-income households can participate in housing delivery when the system recognises their financial realities.

The comparative research found community-led models to be substantially more affordable for very low-income households than some conventional housing approaches.

This is where Namibia needs to rethink the politics of housing. For too long, the debate has been about delivery. How many houses? How many plots? How much money? How many beneficiaries?

But the more meaningful question is:

How many young Namibians can actually afford to become homeowners?

The answer to that question would provide a much more honest measure of success.

The fact that only a small proportion of homeowners reportedly acquire their homes through commercial mortgage finance is revealing.

Recent figures cited by Simonis Storm indicate that around 64% of homeowners built their homes, while only about 6.9% used a bank loan to buy or build a house.

This tells us something important about Namibia’s housing culture.

People are already solving the housing crisis themselves. They build incrementally.

They borrow from family. They save.

They use informal networks.

They extend houses when money becomes available. They live in shacks while saving for something better. They build where formal systems have been unable to provide an affordable alternative.

The tragedy is that policy has not always been designed around this reality.

The government should not necessarily try to replace these mechanisms. It should make them easier, safer and more productive. Serviced land should be available at scale. Planning approvals should be faster.

Bulk infrastructure should be treated as a national economic investment rather than merely a municipal expense.

Affordable construction technologies should be encouraged. Smaller starter homes should be legitimised. Flexible tenure should be expanded.

Housing finance should be redesigned around the realities of irregular and moderate incomes. And municipalities must be held accountable for land-delivery targets. There is also a need for radical transparency.

If the government announces that 10 000 plots will be serviced, citizens should be able to see how many were planned, how many were funded, how many

were actually serviced and where those plots are.

If a housing programme promises 5 000 houses, citizens should know how many were completed, at what cost, who received them and what income category those beneficiaries represented.

Housing cannot remain an area where political announcements are easier to count than actual

outcomes.

Young Namibians have arguably borne the greatest cost of this gap between promise and delivery.

Older generations who acquired land when it was cheaper, built houses incrementally or benefited from earlier housing arrangements possess an asset that has appreciated enormously.

Younger Namibians enter the same market when the entry price has already risen.

The result is an intergenerational inequality that risks becoming entrenched.

A young person without property is not simply without a house. They are potentially without one of the most important mechanisms for building household wealth.

That has consequences for retirement security, inheritance, family stability and economic independence.

If Namibia fails to address this, today’s housing crisis could become tomorrow’s wealth crisis. And that is why the country should stop asking only whether it is building enough houses.

It must ask whether it is building the right houses, on the right land, at the right price, for the right income groups.

The housing crisis is not solved when a house is completed.

It is solved when an ordinary Namibian can realistically afford to live in it.

For a country that has spent decades promising land and housing to its citizens, particularly its young people, that distinction can no longer be ignored.

The uncomfortable truth is that Namibia may not simply be failing to house its young people.

It may be pricing an entire generation out of homeownership.

And unless land delivery, infrastructure, construction costs, housing finance and incomes are tackled as parts of the same problem, the gap between the Namibia young people aspire to own and the Namibia they can actually afford will continue to grow.