The Impact of Gatekeepers and Urban Managers on Access to Land for Residential Real Estate Development in Lagos State, Nigeria

In a capitalist housing market, the provision and allocation of housing resources and units are in the hands of the gatekeepers and urban managers, whose behaviour effectively constraint access to land for residential real estate development. However, a comprehensive survey of the literature revealed that the impact of these urban actors on residential real estate development has never been carried out in the rural-urban fringes of metropolitan areas and most especially in Third World cities. Against this background, this study specifically examined how the activities of gatekeepers and urban managers constrain low-income group’s access to formal and informal land markets as well as the extent to which access to land for residential real estate development is gender biased in the Peri-Urban Interface (PUI) of metropolitan Lagos, Nigeria. The data for this research were from both primary and secondary sources. A multi-stage sampling technique was adopted for administering the household questionnaire to 1200 respondents in 20 peri-urban settlements where the expansion of housing is most rapid. Secondary sources of data include the records of gatekeeping institutions and urban management authorities operating in the study area. Findings revealed that there is an inverse relationship between the need for state residential plots and the provision of such plots by land managers (r = -0.606, P