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PetitHaus: Innovative housing solution that helps low/medium income earners access affordable, highly efficient qualitative living with convenience and unparalleled cost effectiveness.
Affordable Homeownership
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Affordable housing is a pressing issue across Africa, especially in Nigeria where urbanisation is almost in tandem with technological improvements. With land being one of the most expensive components of building a home or real estate development, millions of Nigerians are priced out of adequate housing.
But there’s hope!
If we rethink how we manage and finance land, we can unlock new possibilities that will help to make affordable housing more possible and accessible. This post breaks down practical solutions using relatable examples and highlights how PetitHaus is championing a future where homeownership is within reach for everyone.
Picture this: You’ve saved up for years, dreaming of owning a home, even if it’s on the outskirts of Lagos or Abuja. But when you compare your savings or investment against the prices, the cost of land alone is out of your reach.
Sound familiar?
This is the reality for many Nigerians, where urban land prices are skyrocketing. In some cities, a piece of land in a prime location can cost 1000 times more than a plot just a few kilometres away in the nearest rural community.
As more people migrate to urban areas, the demand for land continues to rise, pushing prices even higher. This is a challenge not only in Nigeria but across Africa, where rapid urbanization outpaces the supply of affordable land. To break this cycle, we need to find smarter ways to manage land and make it more accessible.
So, how do we lower the cost of land and make housing affordable for everyone? Several practical approaches have worked around the world, and they could work for us too. Let's consider just 3.
This is for government people and large-scale developers. But let's say your neighbourhood suddenly gets a new road or Dangote Refinery nearby. The value of all adjoining property will shoot up because of these improvements. Now, who benefits from this? Typically, it's the landowner.
But with Land-Based Finance (LBF), the community can benefit from these value increases too. Here’s how it works: when public projects or zoning changes raise the value of land, a portion of that increase is recaptured through taxes and fees. This money can then be reinvested into affordable housing projects, infrastructure, or other community needs.
For example, in Bogotá, Colombia, a land-based finance policy called "Operación Urbanística Nuevo Usme" used the rising value of land in low-income areas to fund affordable housing developments. Nearly 73 hectares of land were allocated specifically for social housing, providing homes for thousands of families.
For Nigeria, this approach could be applied in rapidly growing cities like Lagos and Abuja. When infrastructure development or a city planning policy results in increased land values, government and/or impact-focused developers can allocate part of that profit back into creating affordable housing.
This is what we call our Land Co-ownership feature, but it's a little bit different. Unlike LBF, this works for individuals and can be a great tool that existing land owners can leverage for profit.
Imagine you and your neighbours live on separate plots of land that aren’t big enough or developed enough to attract investors. What if you all agreed to pool your land together, allowing it to be redeveloped into something that benefits everyone? That’s the concept behind Land Pooling and Readjustment (LP/LR).
This model can be applied especially in semi-urban areas of Nigeria, such as Ogun or Rivers state (I didn't mention Port Harcourt o!..lol). By pooling land, communities can influence the value of their land, for which they can attract investors for Joint Ventures. This can be used directly to develop affordable homes, or indirectly by using profits of the sale (in the case of commercial real estate JV. development) all while ensuring that original landowners still benefit.
Real-life example: In Gujarat, India, landowners in peri-urban areas were able to pool their small, fragmented plots together for a large-scale development project. After the land was serviced with roads and utilities, the landowners received smaller, but more valuable, plots in return. Plus, they didn’t have to move or lose their rights to the land.
If you're like me, then you'd be familiar with the word ‘cooperative’ and all the possibilities that come with it. Many low and middle-income Nigerians dream of owning a piece of land, but due to speculation, the price of land is driven up, making it out of reach.
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) offer a way for communities to control land collectively, ensuring it remains affordable for generations. This sounds like land-banking, but different in the sense that the land is held in trust by a community organization, which ensures it’s used for affordable housing or other collectively agreed uses. Remember the story about my Dad’s cooperative society?
How can this work? Let’s say a co-op group; a community, a group of friends, or even impact-led housing investors want to secure land in the outskirts of Abuja or Lagos for affordable homes. By forming a CLT, they can collectively purchase land, in order to keep the land out of the speculative market. This way, even as property prices rise around them, their land remains affordable, and they can build homes that fit their budget.
Similarly, housing cooperatives allow people to pool their resources to build and own homes together. Instead of one person shouldering the entire cost, a group comes together to fund one or multiple developments, reducing individual costs while promoting community ownership.
At PetitHaus, we’re not just building homes; we’re creating pathways to affordable homeownership through innovative land solutions. What we've done is reimagine LP/LRs and CLTs and then, combine that with an existing practice of buying smaller (half and quarter) portions of Land.
With this co-ownership model, multiple individuals (between 4 & 6) pool cash resources to own a single piece of land. With this, we make land—and by extension homeownership—accessible to individuals by making it easy to spread the costs of acquisition, documentation and development.
Do you want to buy land, but the cost is too high for just you? PetitHaus enables you to co-own (share) the land with others in equal fractions, so you each own a portion while sharing the cost. This isn’t just an idea; it’s already in motion. We’re also digitizing the design-build process to make sustainable, affordable housing a reality without the usual complexity.
With our focus on sustainable construction and community development, PetitHaus is helping to solve the housing affordability challenge. By integrating land-pooling models and advocating for community-led ownership like CLTs, we’re building a future where homeownership is possible for everyone, not just the wealthy.
The road to affordable housing in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, is challenging but full of opportunity. By getting creative and getting support from the government in the form of reviewed and/or relaxed planning policies to accommodate such creativity, we can make homeownership more attainable for millions.
Land ownership is very expensive, especially when it has good title, and in a prime location, but for average/regular Nigerians and Africans by extension, these solutions show that there’s another way forward.
We can turn Land around from being a barrier into the key that unlocks affordable housing for all.
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