UN - Habitat Arena - From Policy to Impact: Scaling Housing Delivery (WUF13)

Greetings to the audience.
I hope we managed to attract some more incomers from the rest of the expo.
But let's get started with the session that we're holding at noon today.
It's an important session in the habitat arena space where we're going to be looking at moving from policy to impact.
How can you scale housing delivery? We're still waiting for one of the speakers, Tina Tin Colbaya who will be joining us from the Spatial Agency for Georgia.
But I think given the time, it would be nice to get the session rolling.
My name is Fiona McLeoney.
I'm the section chief of Policy and Legislation within the Global Solutions Division of UN Habitat.
Um, my section has been working for a long time on national urban policies.
National urban policies cover many land use areas, many dimensions of the way in which a city works.
But the focus of this World Urban Forum is housing.
We want to look at how national urban policies and the work that countries take in national urban policies also relates to enabling the supply of adequate housing to meet our increasingly urbanized world.
The core messages we hope to transmit through this session will be the importance of housing and looking at it from a systems approach, the importance of evidence, evidence about urbanization, evidence about housing supply and demand, and how evidence needs to drive policy making in the context that we work, and then also the importance of an integrated policy coherence in achieving interventions at scale.
I'm very pleased to be able to be joined today on this panel by a number of key speakers.
To my left immediately, I have Aziza Akmoch I really do have your designation here in my notes, who is head of the OEC Division on cities, Urban policies, and sustainable development.
As you know, OECD is a very important think tank and science based policy making institution that covers the OECD countries of the world.
Much of their work in terms of urbanization and sustainable development really leads us in the way we think about urbanization and housing issues.
I'm delighted to have Aziza on the panel to bring that perspective to our discussion today.
I'm also pleased to be joined by my colleagues in UN Habitat.
He San is a project manager within the policy and legislation section and our project manager for the National Urban policies work that is funded largely by the Korean government within our team and she'll be presenting that perspective.
Mattis comes to us from the data section where they've been doing some very substantive work on housing policies and housing and analyzing housing policies across the world.
You'll hear much more about that.
He's a researcher in the global research and Analystic section, and he's been one of the key authors around publications of the World Cities Report, working on UN habitats new urban agenda.
And also has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, which I've just learned from reading here.
Welcome, Mattis and thank you for coming and bringing your perspective.
I also want to introduce doctor Mihal Al Magra, who is joining us.
She's a very key, longtime senator from the Egyptian government and was formerly the Vice Minister of Planning with over two decades of experience in urban governance and economic reform.
She's been a senior advisor in Egypt and also in Oman in managing and implementing urban policies, not only from the UN Habitat program but also from the government's own program.
Warm welcome to you, Nihal.
We look forward to hearing from you with this regional perspective.
Well, greetings to the panel, and I will introduce Tatin when she comes.
But let's transition immediately, really, and hear from Aziza from the OECD perspective, how you see moving to scale and impact in housing delivery from the work that you do.
Would you Please take this time.
Thank you very much, Fiona.
I'd like to start by congratulating you for picking housing as the core priority of this World Urban Forum.
We've been very vocal at the OECD over the past ten years, but more recently that we're not just facing a housing challenge, we're actually facing a housing emergency.
Um, even in advanced economies, the OECD is really the club of advanced economies, we see, and that's the rationale for an organization working on economic cooperation to look at this issue, we see to which extent housing is becoming or the lack of housing or not affordable housing or poor quality housing is becoming not only a drag on competitiveness, but also a major source of discontent.
But even in some of the data we've produced has been correlated with the rise of this new geography of discontent and populism in a number of countries.
What we've heard over the past two days in Baku really is that the credibility of public policy is now judged by delivery and not by declarations.
As an organization whose core mission is to help governments design better policies for better lives, we're looking at this very closely because nowhere is this more visible or more politically sensitive than in housing.
What we see is that today more than 2.8 billion people lack access to adequate housing, over 1 billion living in informal settlement.
This is therefore not just a social issue, it's actually an economic issue.
It's a climate resilience issue and I Fin it's a democratic trust issue, that is the foundation of social contract.
As the OECD and beyond, people are actually telling us every day uh, this very loud and clear.
Nearly one in two people fear that they will not be able to secure adequate housing in the near future.
In political terms, this is a very clear warning signal that governments cannot afford to ignore.
Now, how do you turn that ambition from, um, to something that is closer to credibility because we know many OECD countries have bold housing targets, but we also know that it's not targets that build homes, it's actually systems.
The real gap that we're facing in many countries is actually not a gap in vision.
It's really a gap in implementation.
There are different reasons for that.
The first one being that housing responsibilities are often very scattered across ministries and levels of government.
We recently did a survey where we saw that in over 80% of OECD's 38 countries, housing is shared by at least three different sectoral ministries.
In most of these cases, there is no coordinated mechanism in place.
This may change now with an EU level Housing Affordability Plan Taskforce Act that is of course a priority for many OECD countries.
Therefore, this is not sustainable also financially because we know housing prerogatives are also scattered across levels of government with local governments having very important roles to play in terms of issuing permits, in terms of planning land use, in terms of delivering infrastructure.
But they're often asked to do that without the full toolbox.
We heard earlier this week, I found the quote was very interesting that local governments are expected to solve global problems with local budgets.
I think that's really that, the unfunded mandate that is of course not of course sustainable.
So if we're really serious about scaling, going to your question, national governments must step up very significantly.
We need clear frameworks, we need aligned incentives, we need sustained investments, not only to unlock housing supply, to accelerate permitting systems, to invest in infrastructure, to mobilize finance at scale, but also to strengthen the institutional capacity.
And the problem we see in many OECD countries is that we have a structural imbalance because social rental housing represents just about 7% of the total stock on average.
And this is not simply statistics.
This is reflecting this imbalance in our housing system where affordability is too often, and that's an economic organization saying that, left to market dynamics alone.
Um and we cannot solve a global public crisis with fragmented responses.
We need a system wide approach, and this is where national urban policy comes in.
We have and collaborating with UN Habitat for over a decade, made it very clear to member countries in the OECD region that at national level, regardless of the institutional organization, federal, unitary, centralized, decentralized, they have a very important role in getting their cities right in driving through national urban policy this system wide vision that aligns housing with transport, land use, economic opportunities, for a balanced system, quality urbanization that relies on a system of cities of different sizes rather than just large metropolitan areas left on their own and then rural hinterlands.
This global monitoring of national urban policy that we've been doing with UN habitat for almost a decade now covers over 80 countries and shows, and that's promising from the latest one carried out now two years ago, that over 80% of countries report that national urban policy has improved their ability to manage urbanization and to strengthen resilience because of the political leadership is in place and whether this loop is explicit or implicit, whether it's narrow in sector or broad in its sectoral approach, whether it's more guidance or more action oriented.
There is a huge diversity of institutional frameworks across member countries.
In all settings, what it does is to put the housing policy in the perspective of what makes urbanization a quality process and that's therefore not just an aggregation of sectoral initiatives.
It's a political choice, and if we are serious about that, governments really need to prioritize long term outcomes over short term gains.
They need to align incentives across ministries and levels of government and they need to invest in institutional capacity for the stronger systems that cover, and I finish here, not only housing challenges in silo, but in a way that is systemic.
It's a supply issue, it's a demand issue, it's a quality issue, it's an affordability issue, but it's also a governance and financing one.
We need loops that actually reflect the importance of housing for well being.
Aziza, thank you so much for putting this big issue into perspective and mentioning some of the dimensions that are causing the current crisis.
I'm going to turn now to the NOP, the acronym which reads National Urban Policies and ask He Sam to give us an overview of how the National Urban policy work that has been done really enables countries to set this framework.
When you work on a global basis, having a process that is actually applicable across countries across the world is quite a challenge.
Please hands on over to you to outline a little bit more about the details around the NOP.
Then maybe we can come back to some of the points that Aziza made about systems thinking and integrated approaches when we come to the discussion.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Thank you very much, Fiona.
Yeah, I think I have to stand up to deliver the presentation better because I have this presentation material which is supposed to be cover up here.
So yes, I think the presentation prepared will be on the screen, but in the meantime, I think I can just start.
I'm sorry, Hassan, you seem to be competing with a foghrn.
Maybe we're by the sea or something.
Yeah.
But go ahead.
Oh, yes.
This is the presentation.
Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Hessan A, and I am an associate program Officer at the policy and Legislation section of UN Habitat.
Uh, because time is limited, one key message that I would ask to take after this session is that national urban policy is really important in the middle of this housing challenge, and also to address this, uh, the policy could not stand alone.
The key thing is the collaboration between national urban policy and urban legislation.
So then let's start the presentation.
So what's the housing challenge in this world? So the cities, they create more than 70% of the GDP, but also it drives a lot of demands and risks.
And what will be the housing challenges, main challenges.
So housing, while it's really basic rights and basic needs, Also, we have many issues that we are facing related to the housing.
For example, your house is built too far from your work or the affordable housing is not totally affordable, or even sometimes there are some informal settlements which is growing, much more faster than the planning system could respond.
So these are the main challenges, and this is why housing challenges are one of the key parts that national or urban agendas are dealing with.
So That's why also the National Urban Policy or the NUP is really important because NUP provides a coordinating framework which makes help the housing outcomes could be delivered in housing deliveries.
So the key message from this is the housing outcomes depends on how well NUPs aligns actors and investments.
So if we go to the next page, I will show how actually this works and what will be the exact evidence and what will be the situation, how each countries are responding to these housing challenges.
So this global state of National urban policy is the extensive research and survey that was published by our section, together with the OECD.
So it's a collaboration between UN Habitat and OECD and the recent one was published in 2024.
And it addresses some of the national urban policies that promotes the housing challenges and housing delivery.
So for example, the identified top three housing challenges are inadequate location of housing, stringent land use, and inadequate social housing.
And also, among the many countries who are putting these housing efforts in their NU pieces, there is a huge attentions on sustainability, adequacy, and affordability.
And actually these issues, housing challenges and this attention to housing theme, actually it's effectively reflect to specific countries NU pieces.
For example, in Burkina Faso, dissent and social housing is one of the key area of their NU pieces.
And also in Nigeria, housing challenge is one of their priorities, and also in Mali, they put the housing as their first objective in their NU piece.
So this shows how important that each country deals with their housing challenges and housing issues incorporating into their NU piece.
So now we saw the importance of NUP in dealing with housing, and also while there is 82% countries among the 78 respondents country, they showed that they have housing policy outside of their NUP framework, which is that they have even separate housing policy apart from their NUPs, but still we noticed that only 40% among those 82% of countries they have aligned the system in terms of managing because they have 60% of countries, they have said that the housing ministry are different from the lead NUP agency, which means that there is still improvements needed or maybe still efforts needed to align this system because NUP is not a sole document, but this is a system that could be arranged and aligned to each other to better deliver the housing efforts.
So this was one of the most important pillars, which was NUP, but there is another important pillar, which is urban legislation.
So the national urban policy and urban legislation is so important, and then it's even two main action items of new urban agenda.
So now let's see the urban legislation.
So why urban legislation is important because housing outcomes can be shaped by a legal system coherence.
And this is hugely because urban legal systems are working together with various systems such as planning, infrastructure, and land and governance, land and housing government and also infrastructure mechanisms or investment mechanisms.
So these all constitute the system which should be coordinated each other.
So if urban legislation is lacking or if it's weak, it also drives many issues such as, for example, the restrictive zoning, also this cause the limits of social housing provision.
Also weak tenure system also includes the vulnerable community in their society.
And overlapping of the mandate, this delays the housing delivery, and also it reduced accountability.
So this is why all the system is so important and housing outcomes improve and legal systems operate in a coordinate, coherent and inf manner.
Also, these are some examples.
I think I can keep it really quick.
So under UN Habitat work on urban legal pathways to advanced housing, there was seven dimensions identified, and we figured out identified each case studies for the seven dimensions.
For example, for the affordability, Germany has this rent control system backed by the Civil Code and also for the habitability, South Africa has this national regulation that enforces building safety standards.
So and also we have examples on the availability of services, location, accessibility, security of tenure, and culture adequacy.
So this proves that how urban legislation is well developed, how we can improve the housing delivery and housing outcomes.
All right.
So we go we went through how national urban policy and how legislation is so important in housing delivery, and now our suggestion is, it's really important to integrate policy and legislation.
Because urban policy without legislation it's a vision without drive.
And urban legislation without policy, it's just an enforcement without vision and without direction.
So that's why we need to integrate policy and legislation to enhance the whole system to be aligned and to be coordinated.
This also link to some of the mechanisms such as governance and financing mechanisms.
And also another important point is this whole process to be inclusive in social wise because we need to whenever we make a decision for policy and legislation, we need to hear from all of the stakeholders from different levels, and this is the key to develop the policy and legislation and further implement.
And finally, this is all related to the institutional capacity.
It's really important to strengthen the local capacity to develop and implement and actually the paper could be impacted on the ground.
Yeah, that's our suggestion.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Hey, San.
Do come and sit down and a warm welcome to Tinntin who's joined us on the stage, and we'll hear from you shortly.
But I want to stay at this global level and now turn to Matias Van Nostrum.
Matias is going to talk to us about the launch at the National Housing Policy repository, looking at the National Housing policies and a global perspective.
Fire away.
Thank you very much for the introduction and it's a great follow up from the presentation we just had on national urban policy.
H and Habitat has been working on national urban policy for over a decade now and it's been even been integrated in the SDG so forth.
We have been looking at a complementary side of it, which is national housing policies.
So this is important for the same reasons that national urban policy is important.
You can have policy all over the place in different sectors at different levels, but at some point you need to bring those together to make sure you have coordination between national, sub national and local levels, but then also across sectors, across ministries, across departments, et cetera.
This idea of having a national housing policy is a recurtal tool if we want to achieve adequate housing.
Now, what we did is an initial sort of scoping exercise.
This is new data, first time ever that we've did a global survey to look at which countries have national housing policy and which countries do not have national housing policy.
And we looked at three criteria to define this that are at the bottom left of the page.
Is it a national framework? Is it explicitly about housing officially issued? So not a very high bar to clear.
But if you look at the graph, you see that it's a very mixed picture.
Around half of countries we identified have an explicit dedicated national housing policy.
So one consolidated place where stakeholders, where different levels of government can go to to find guidance on how to advance adequate housing.
But then we see a mixed group of other countries where you have national housing policy in different ways on platforms, on shared databases.
We also see a lot of housing policies that have very specific thematic or sectoral focus.
For example, a lot of national housing policies we identified are actually public housing policies.
In many countries, especially in Europe, you see that their approach to housing from a national perspective is very focused on public housing.
And part of, I think what we want to promote at habitat is that it's important that those countries also look at other aspects of housing policy and prepare their policy in an integrated manner.
Next slide, please, I have to do myself.
Um So this is the same data, but then looked at by region.
So you can see that the highest level of countries that actually have national housing policies is in Latin America.
More than 70% of countries in that region have a dedicated national housing policy, but it's much lower in a place like Africa, for example, and this is a concern because we know that Africa is urbanizing, that they're already having housing issues, they're likely to intensify.
So it's very, very important that keys countries at least start the preparation of a national housing policy to try to address this in an integrated manner.
The other thing I wanted to point out here in this slide is that we realized that some countries have a national housing policy, and some countries also have dedicated National Housing Acts.
And sometimes those National Housing Acts can be quite comprehensive and they become the de facto national housing policy.
But some countries also have both.
And of course, they're quite important that they're coordinated with each other, but they can also support each other.
So the National Housing Act can provide the legal basis to issue a national housing policy.
But we also see examples of countries that prepare a national housing policy and that basically put a directive in place to prepare a National Housing Act to advance this also from a legal perspective.
Then we looked at also several thematic areas.
What is actually in these national housing policies.
These are the same seven plus one dimensions of adequate housing that have been agreed upon and are part of our international frameworks.
I hope you're familiar with the framework we have on adequate housing.
But you can clearly see here that the national housing policies have a specific focus.
Most of them are primarily concerned with affordability.
And this aligns with what we know about how the global housing crisis is often framed.
It's often seen primarily as an affordability issue.
But of course, we shouldn't forget there's many aspects to adequate housing, and issues such as cultural adequacy, such as location are not very well addressed.
And actually, I think this is quite interesting, actually, but the previous presentation we saw You see in national urban policies, the dimension of location was actually very well addressed, right? If you take an urban perspective, this dimension of location comes to the forefront.
Yet if you look at specific national housing policies, you see that this aspect of location is not at all well integrated.
So this is also an argument for countries to take their national urban policy, their national housing policy, and integrate and better make sure that their processes are aligned.
We also see that sustainability is an element that comes to the forefront a lot.
Sustainability, as you may or may not know, is not actually part of the dimensions of adequate housing.
We've been arguing as habitat that it should be, and this is reflected in national housing policy.
National housing policy spent a lot of attention on sustainability aspects.
So we need to take cue from this and adopt these in our international frameworks as well.
Then this slide that I will not go over in detail, we did an analysis of what kind of themes are national housing policies talking about for different regions.
And you can look at your own region and see perhaps what countries in your own region are discussing.
But what I want to point out here is some of the themes at the bottom of the list.
We see that there's very few national housing policies that look at housing for migrant population.
There's very few that look at access to public transport, very few that look at housing vacancy, very few that look at vernacular and indigenous housing, Africa, there is an exception, quite interesting.
So Obviously, a national housing policy can't address all aspects of housing.
In some places, different elements are more important than others.
But for us, it was a clear cue that for countries to address the housing crisis, they need to do so in a comprehensive manner and make sure that they identify which themes are not yet well captured and try to integrate those when they update their national housing policies.
That brings me to my final slide, which is the key messages really to everyone out there, to stakeholders, but specifically to countries, is the key key thing we want to say is if your country does not yet have a national housing policy, They need to prepare one.
The other thing we realized that as many countries have national housing policies that are quite old, sometimes adopted over ten years ago, so it's important to update them, especially with the evolving nature of our housing crisis.
Then some of the points I already mentioned, it's important to have policy integration with National Housing Acts, I to have a comprehensive approach, looking at the different dimensions of adequate housing and different themes, aligned with the global frameworks, including the NOAA and the SDG.
Then finally, as you may know, we have an ongoing open ended working group on adequate housing, and one of the key topics that we will discuss up to 2029 is, in fact, this issue of integrated national housing policies.
So there's a lot more coming from Habitats on this, and hopefully at some point, we'll be able to develop normative tools in the same way also that we've been working on for national urban policies to complement that.
That was my slide.
Back to you, Fiona.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mattis really.
I a whirlwind tour across housing policies globally.
But I think from what I pick up there is the importance of the definition of adequacy and the full dimensions of that.
Then the key themes that you're talking about and you've identified.
We can see how globally they are reflected differently across the world, but they also obviously add up to the full picture of interventions that are required in an integrated way if you're going to address this issue.
Hopefully, we can come back with questions on whether this repository and data, how it can help, and maybe what the next steps are.
But before we do that and keep your questions, prepare your questions, I'd like to go to Nahal.
Really welcome to you, and you're going to give us a bit of a regional perspective coming from the Arab world and looking at how this sort of policy work has informed what you're doing, what you've worked on in that context.
Thank you, Nahal.
Thank you so much.
I'm very happy to be at Wolf 13 in the beautiful city of Baku and to joining this interesting panel on housing.
This issue is really very important for the Arab region.
As you know, the Arab region is not homogeneous with the 22 countries, is not homogeneous with all what is going on.
I mean, in different circumstances, political and economic.
But the housing issues are really at the core importance for this region and for the different countries, especially that they are facing a lot of risks, and these risks, unfortunately, are not permanent temporary risk, they are now becoming structural risks.
So we find that the from these risks, the affordability, pressures for housing, informality, climate risks, conflict related displacement, and growing expectation for citizens for better access to adequate housing and basic services.
This is why the national housing policies are becoming very important.
As my colleagues mentioned, it's a global issue.
It's also have a different connotation in different regions.
I want to talk about a very interesting, a program that the UN Habitat, the Regional Office for Arab States launched recently which relates to advancing national housing profiles and housing strategies in selected countries in the Arab regions.
We stress the importance of having national housing policies that are related to national urban policies and to different other social and economic and maybe climate also and environmental policies.
But to have these policies and to have actionable policies and important policies to be scaled up, we need definitely diagnosis and we need data and we need to have what we call the evidence based policies.
This is why this program is very important because it relates to having profiles for housing in almost most of the Arab countries, some of them are already implemented and others are in the queue.
After these reports were prepared at the country level, they were also collected in a regional report that will be launched very soon.
So the diagnosis also covers a lot of aspects that we talked about.
It's not only about the demand for housing or the supply of housing, but it relates also to the supply demand gap, also to rent issues to legislations, to also the type of infrastructure needed to land tenure, to urban planning.
So it relates to a lot of aspects related to the housing profiles.
The issue also is that the most important issue related to this program is that it was institutionalized in the way that it's linked to the Ministerial Council of Housing Ministers at the League of Arab State.
This institutionalization is very important because each time these housing ministers meet in this council, they will have to review these profiles.
They will have to review a monitoring report that says what happened to these profiles? Are they updated? Are there new issues to be addressed? The most important thing also is if any declarations or any actions should be taken, then this will be the place so it will be done at a regional level.
This also program has a lot of capacity building issues because it helps Arab states to have these profiles.
They understand better the sector, but also they integrate a lot of people, a lot of experts in preparing these reports.
They raise awareness about the importance of the different aspects of the housing sector in the Arab states.
In addition, it has also a very important aspect of learning from each other and knowledge exchange among Arab states.
The housing profiles and this program is also related to the new Urban agenda monitoring report that is done at the state level and also at the regional level and the regional report about the new urban agenda will be also launched in Of 13.
Another thing that I want also to mention it relates also to the use of technology because maybe we mentioned this in depth, but in order to have these profiles and to make use of it, definitely we can benefit from all the technological advancement of the AI in order to have a better understanding of the housing profiles in the Arab States.
This is what I have to share with you now.
Thank you, doctor Nahal and very interesting to hear about the country level housing profiles building into an accountability to the ministerial Council for the whole of the region, and maybe a little bit of competition between countries as well as measuring benchmarks to see how well they've done so a really regional approach taken there, looking at different aspects of housing.
I know it's a region also that was the home of the Last Wolf.
So some of these discussions were held there, but also a region where housing issues have had many impacts from different reasons.
Now we're going to just go quickly to a country perspective.
I'm really pleased to have us join on the stage, miss Tintin Colbaya.
She is the Deputy Head of the Spatial and Urban Development Agency in Georgia.
And she's been working on land management and institutional reform across the ministry and in Tbilisi City Hall.
She's going to give us a little bit of a perspective from the region we're here in at this Wolf on housing issues in Georgia.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I'm Tina Galbaya from Special and Urban Development Agency of Georgia.
I never missed the opportunity to say a few words about our institution and what we are working for.
We are planning institution and this institution was institutionalized in 2022 because the agenda came the need of planning in Georgia.
Uh, and we are created as the public entity legal entity of public law.
The main idea of creating as the independent agency of planning was to elaborate national special Plan.
We are covering municipalities as well.
We are working on the municipal plans, we are working on the municipal urban and local plans, but the main goal is to prepare national special plan.
For very easier housing, we can ask this and with a few words, I will say that in our legislation, housing is mentioned as the item, as the topic, and as an issue in the so called special codes that we operate under.
So in the Special Code, there is a provision which states that housing will be regulated by the special regulation.
However, after a seven years housing is not regulated on the national level.
We don't have national housing policy.
However, we do have separate fragmented housing programs according to the needs of the society.
As you know, we are post Soviet country and we face the heritage of conflicts and post Soviet collapse.
So what was the reality of Georgia in 90s, Georgia had 10% of its population as IDPs because two areas, one autonomous Republic and another region was occupied and we had about half million people as IDPs.
And for 30 years, we were facing the need of compensation and sheltering those people.
So even now up to now, government is doing housing programs for the IDPs as the compensation mechanism and the Ministry of Health has developed its own policy according according to the needs and the indicators, IDPs are provided with the houses within the capital city or in the regions where they are located, where they live, and they have self supporting programs as well.
Government is supporting civil servants, especially military and police people, and they are building houses and apartments to the military servants.
We do have fragmented policy for eco migrants as well.
And within the city, we have urban regeneration programs within the historic part of the city and I in the depreciated areas of the cities where government is supporting with public private partnership, replacement of the depreciated houses and giving new houses.
However, this policy, I would admit that is really fragmented and really sectoral and we do need one policy.
Georgia faced the housing housing regulation needs already.
In 2024, with the help of your inhabitant, we dedicated Urban Forum to housing and with these declared actions, we committed to elaborate framework for the unified and one urban policy.
This year, uh, with the help of human habitat for sure, we had the outline, certain outlines of the urban policy.
How was the urban was the housing policy, I'm sorry, housing policy supported by the different legislations, by the governmental programs on the municipal level or on the national level.
We of course do have certain programs for contribution to condominiums, for urban regenerations, but it needs real analysis.
It now needs the data because, Construction, especially in Tilisi has really high percentage in the economy and developing and there are a lot of houses distributed right now, regulatory framework has to be really established.
Right now, we don't have price control.
Our region is really sensitive geopolitically and even the war in Ukraine hugely was depicted on the housing prices and sometimes we feel that for some classes, employers, and other people or students, rents might be really high.
What's the way forward? We despite the fact that there is no one dedicated institution in the housing policy, we feel that it is part of the planning, definitely it's the part of the special planning.
So we are about to we are trying to prepare with the help of international donors National S P concept.
So the main outline main outlines, findings, researches, data, we will analyze all these and put main directions for the national housing policy in the incorporating the national special plan concept.
The work there will be, of course, needed extra work, but Georgia is already for that, very interesting that urban and housing policy shall be under one umbrella.
I think that we can implement that one umbrella.
Even small steps are made, even right now, if we have some urban or special plans, we do support them with priority investment plans and priority investment plan is always started with the basic infrastructure that is not directly related to the housing and the quality of housing and quality of living.
The priority investment plans are implemented by the local or by the central government immediately as they are issued and adopted by the councils of the municipality.
This is the picture of housing in Georgia.
I hope that tomorrow will be better and housing policy will be elaborated in our country.
Thank you very much very much.
Really.
Thank you for that country perspective, really showing us some of the nuances of the history, the communist housing stock, the really importance of IDPs, and then now how the housing market is working in Tbilisian these issues are the types of issues that a policy needs to address.
You've heard from the panel I'm going to just turn to the audience and see if there's anyone that has a burning question to any of the colleagues onstage, putting you on the spot a little bit, but maybe not.
In the absence and do think about a question if you have one, I'm going to turn to Azaz.
You were able to give some opening remarks at the beginning, talking about really the dimensions of this critical issue.
You now have heard from the presentations.
I wonder if you have any reflections.
I found those were fascinating interventions and actually, we see that we have different geographical realities but actually common headaches.
But I think for me, there are three things that stand out and there are question marks, it's not that I have the response to them, but I think from my Tish presentation, the question I would raise is how the call to develop explicit, bold, ambitious national housing policies is aligned with the call to develop explicit national urban policies and doesn't call for another sectoral fragmentation.
I get nervous when people say, we have to break silos.
I come from a water background and I think we need silos because silos are a synonym of competence, of credibility, we need to bridge silos more than breaking silos.
But I think that takes me to the second point.
The question mark is then how you align those national housing policies with national urban policies.
What I see is that often national urban policies tend to focus on special development metrics while national housing policies often focus on housing supply metrics.
I think we're calling on governments to have really shared targets that look at affordability, density, accessibility, climate resilience that are much broader than supply.
I think there's a lot of things you can do that, considering NP platforms as umbrella, strategies, linking funding to policy coherence.
There are lots of mechanisms you can use, but that would be my second point.
The last point, I think that is a blind spot here in the conversation is how we leverage foresight to avoid continuing to do harm or let's say not to lock us in trajectories that are not consistent with what we are seeing come in many OECD countries.
For example, there's a lot of conversations on climate and housing because yes, there's the question of stranded assets, and that's not an environmental issue only it's an economic and financial stability issue, but we don't talk that much about demographic change.
We know many OECD countries are actually aging.
In France, home ownership is very high.
There is one thing that we are pretty confident about, which is that someone who is age 65 today and is a homeowner will be dead in 35 years.
There's already a number of academics and policymakers that are conceptualizing this pappy crash, grandfather crash, they call it, where in 20 years, we're going to find in the housing stock market, a number of units that are used to finance the elderly and care.
There's a lot, I think leveraging foresight can also avoid us being stuck in very short term dynamics to handle the hot potato today, but keep these trade off conversation.
I think demographic change and aging in OECD countries is really the blind spot of policies today.
Really.
Thank you for that.
Very interesting and the financialization of housing to support the future for individual families as they age is really a key issue and also probably oversupply.
This ability to downgrade is very important.
I think I'm going to turn really to each of you probably as we close this session.
This has been more of a These are the issues.
There's a lot to think about to consider.
I think the point about foresight is the need to take an innovative approach as we move forward.
We need data, we need evidence, but also to build good policy, you need policy thinkers to think in a collective and innovative way and create the visions that we need for the future.
If you give me a moment, I was really struck because we talk about spatial dimensions of national urban policies and we talk about housing supply dimensions of the housing policies.
But isn't it interesting that the housing policies don't mention public transport, which where you would have thought the spatial and the housing would really come together and that's where we would get these real benefits of a new way of living in urban contexts with public transport versus private car ownership being a model to move us around.
But that aside, I'm going to turn to each of you and maybe say, if you had one thing to do next in relation to scaling up impact, what would it be? I'll doctor Nahal first to you.
I think the most important thing is to turn these national housing policies into investment framework.
Without finance, we cannot do anything, we cannot cover everything.
You just mentioned that national housing policy does not mention transportation because transportation is really very expensive.
So it needs a lot of not only spatial planning, but also financial planning and to incentivize the private sector to be part of providing these services.
So I think this is very important.
The other issue is also to have this link between the housing policy, the investment framework, and also the monitoring and evaluation because without having testing and making sure that the policies are implement and implemented, and then also evaluate their impact on people.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Over to you, Tintin.
Is there something from your Georgia perspective or you've heard about this globally that you say that this is the next step we need to take? For us, next step definitely is unified housing policy where all the segments, all the sectors will be incorporated that housing is not only the shelter, it's like integration into the society and how to keep in every district, all the classes and how to support most vulnerable groups to be integrated in the society.
I think that these are the main ideas of the housing and I hope that it will be incorporated in our policy.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hean, you're sitting in UN habitats within the policy section, but maybe you also have a Korean perspective on this.
Yes.
For the next steps or maybe some of the before steps before and next of the NUP, I would like to highlight two points.
First would be the policy coherence and I also would like to highlight the importance of NUP once again because NUP is the key driver that makes policy coherence possible because it applies because as you and Habita we set up guidelines, et cetera, the big agenda, but also is really important.
This policy could be implemented on the ground.
Policy coherence, the NUP enables it because it touches from the central government to the sub national governments.
So I think NUP makes it really happen.
Another point, the NUP is so important in shaping next step is also related to the investment because the system is coordinated and aligned to each other.
The NUP could work with this really important role in actually mobilizing the resources uh, so this policy could be implemented and to happen on the ground.
So I think in terms of mobilization, the policy set in especially in national urban policy setting is so important.
I would like to highlight to those two points.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Final word from Mattis on the housing repository, but maybe what happens next with that? No, thanks for the question.
We have many plans with what we want to do with this further, but I think that one thing perhaps I wanted to highlight and actually the executive Director of habitat mentioned it in her opening remarks in today's morning dialogue.
We are also working at habitat at a knowledge platform for housing.
So one of the things we also realized just in trying to find and access some of these national housing policies can be quite difficult to find.
They're coming in languages that makes sense to the country there.
But if you wanted to also engage in peer to peer learning, may not be easy to learn from that.
So one of the things we're doing at habitat is trying to bring all of that together.
So that you and any other person, countries, stakeholder, et cetera, can go to a repository where they can find their own national housing policy, their own national urban policy, all kinds of other policies, all kinds of reviews, including housing profiles, et cetera, but also look at other countries and see where they can learn, right? So perhaps if Georgia is developing their policy, they can see what other countries are out there and what do they have available.
So this is one of the sort of products we're working at habitat in the long term to try to make this available to the public and anyone who wants to use it.
So more on that in the coming years.
Next move, hopefully.
Thank you, Matias.
Well, a big round of applause to all of the speakers.
I hope this is fuel for future discussions and moving us all forward.
Thank you very much.