Experts urge Lagos to convert abandoned public buildings into affordable homes

Housing experts have called for the conversion of abandoned and underutilised public buildings into affordable homes, arguing that government should maximise existing assets before committing scarce resources to new estates.

The call was made at the opening session of 'Reclaiming the City', a webinar series convened by the Rethinking Cities Initiative and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung to examine Lagos' housing crisis and its growing stock of idle public properties. The session brought together the Lagos State Commissioner for Housing, Moruf Akinderu-Fatai, urban researchers, developers and green building professionals.

A policy brief titled 'Reclaiming the City: Empty Public Buildings and the Manufactured Housing Scarcity in Lagos' argued that the housing crisis is driven not only by population growth and land scarcity but also by policy choices that have left valuable buildings and serviced land idle. It noted that most Lagos residents earn less than N100,000 a month, while about 92.7% of the workforce operates in the informal economy, limiting access to conventional mortgages. Many low-income households spend 40% to 60% of their income on rent, often paid one or two years in advance.

The brief proposed a graduated levy on privately owned buildings and serviced land deliberately kept vacant for speculation, with proceeds channelled into a ring-fenced Inclusionary Housing Trust Fund for affordable and social housing. It also recommended that suitable idle public buildings be repurposed rather than sold, potentially licensed to cooperatives, community organisations and other social housing providers under transparent arrangements.

Prof. Timothy Nubi of the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos argued that reclaiming empty buildings depended less on funding than on effective institutional frameworks and on resolving the legal and financial constraints that keep serviceable public assets out of use. Former South-West Vice President of the Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria, Debo Adejana, cautioned that adaptive reuse is not automatically cheaper, though it can deliver savings in materials, costs and carbon emissions where existing structures remain sound.

Taibat Lawanson, a Leverhulme Professor of Planning and Heritage at the University of Liverpool, said government intervention should go beyond building units for sale and give greater attention to public and social rental housing, and called for a comprehensive inventory of vacant public properties by estate surveyors and valuers.

Housing Commissioner Akinderu-Fatai acknowledged the challenge, citing high construction costs, inadequate housing data and declining property sales, and said the state was exploring vertical development to accommodate more residents within Lagos' limited land space. He said the state had identified several abandoned buildings, but ownership and jurisdiction issues, particularly involving federal properties, had complicated efforts to return them to productive use.