Assessment of Incremental Housing Development as a Strategy for Affordable Housing Delivery in Abuja

The persistent challenge of housing affordability in Abuja has increased the need for alternative housing delivery approaches that enable households to develop housing in line with their financial capacity. Hence, this study assessed incremental housing as an affordable housing solution in Abuja, focusing on its features, influencing factors, associated challenges and effect on housing affordability. A quantitative research design was adopted, with data obtained from 164 Real Estate Developers through a structured questionnaire. Weighted Mean Score, Factor analysis and correlation analysis was used to analyses the retrieved data. The findings indicate that staged construction, progressive expansion and owner-driven development constitute prominent features of incremental housing. The assessment of affordability showed that incremental housing enables households to distribute construction costs over time, although affordability varies across income groups. In addition, four (4) major factors influencing incremental housing development were identified, namely: financial/economic, land/institutional, construction/technical and social/household factors. The research further identified major challenges to include high costs of building-materials land costs, limited access to affordable finance, infrastructure costs and high lending rates. Furthermore, the study also established a statistically significant positive relationship between incremental housing and housing affordability (r = 0.684, p < 0.001). The study concluded that incremental housing has considerable potential to complement conventional housing delivery in Abuja. Thus, the study recommended greater institutional support through affordable finance, serviced land, appropriate infrastructure, simplified development procedures and cost-effective construction technologies to strengthen its contribution to sustainable and affordable housing delivery.