Assessment Of Housing Quality Of Selected Residential Estates In Lagos State, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

In the face of deteriorating quality of housing environment in urban areas in developing countries, including Nigeria, the need for strategies that can help reverse this trend cannot be overemphasised. It is in search for such strategies to improve the quality of residential environment that the assessment of housing quality in mass housing estates has continued to engage the attention of scholars and researchers within and outside Nigeria. However, there has been very little attempt to investigate and understand the quality of housing constructed solely by government agencies and that provided through the Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) arrangement in Nigeria. This study assessed housing quality of selected residential estates in Lagos State, Nigeria, with a view to identifying how to improve housing quality in government and PPP residential estates. The research was based on a cross-sectional survey of randomly selected 379 household heads in fifteen housing estates for low, middle and high-income earners in the study area. The data were collected using questionnaire, observation schedule and photographic materials, and analysed with the help of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The data were subjected to descriptive statistics, Kendall Tau, Kruskal Wallis, Median Tests and Categorical Regression (CATREG) analyses. The results revealed that a majority of the household-heads were educated, middle-aged, low-income earners and males living in rented 3- bedroom housing units. They rated their dwelling units, neighbourhood environment and overall quality of housing in the estates as good. Comparatively, the high-income housing estates were rated as having a better quality of housing than the middle and low-income residential estates, while the estates constructed solely by government agencies were also rated higher on the quality scale than those developed through the PPP arrangements. In addition, a significant relationship between the quality of dwelling units, neighbourhood environment and the overall housing quality was established in the estates. Furthermore, the CATREG analysis, which produced a model accounting for about 50 per cent of the variance in housing quality, identified eleven significant predictors of housing quality in the estates. Those with the greatest impact on housing quality include housing adequacy and satisfaction (β =0.337); estate conditions (β =0.203); number of bedrooms in the dwelling units (β= 0.169); and length of stay in the residences (β 0.169). The key implication of these findings is that the quality of housing in the residential estates developed by government agencies and through the PPPs can be significantly improved and if housing designers, developers and managers pay adequate attention to issues that promote qualitative adequacy of housing; higher levels of satisfaction by residents; access to adequate number of bedrooms based on household income; and homeownership among all categories of residents, especially the low and middle-income urban households in Nigeria.