Homeownership and tenure (in)security in fractured urban peripheries: Ethiopia’s mass housing programme

Ethiopia’s Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP) is among the most ambitious housing programmes in Africa, producing over 300,000 relatively low-cost condominiums. This article considers why, despite bolstering property ownership and achieving moderate success in relation to some of its aims, the IHDP largely failed to address challenges of homeownership and tenure security. We draw on primary research to analyse three elements of this failure. First, although the programme did generate property ownership, many recipients could not afford the loan repayments and had to move out, displacing them from their property and generating a rapidly-inflating rental market that undermined housing affordability. Second, measures to ensure the housing is ‘low cost’ compromised living conditions, impeding ‘ontological security’ and a secure sense of home for many renters and owner-occupiers. Third, the tenure security of other communities on the urban fringe was sacrificed as the programme expanded into the periphery. Overall, the IHDP illustrates how problematic it is to combine the affordability and value-creation functions of state housing. Contributing to wider debates on property ownership and tenure security, we suggest that efforts to boost the former can actually undermine homeownership, as well as creating new forms of insecurity for renters and homeowners alike.