The complex dynamics of Nairobi’s low-income housing services and land markets

This paper identifies the housing typologies available for low-income Nairobi residents and analyses other findings on land, gendered access to shelter, and housing market dynamics. Nairobi’s formal housing market is vibrant but often inaccessible to lower-income households, who rely overwhelmingly on informal housing markets. Although rental housing is the norm in Nairobi, there is a wide range of low-income rental options. One particularly salient finding of the research to date is the growing dominance of tenement housing, which is often of poor construction and without adequate connections to basic services. The paper notes that future shelter interventions will need to respond to residents’ household and community-level challenges, paying attention to the diverse informal housing markets across Nairobi.