Housing: enabling markets to work

This paper articulates the housing policy of the World Bank as it has evolved during the 1980s and early 1990s and proposes a number of important new policy directions for both the Bank and its borrowers. It advocates the reform of government policies, institutions, and regulations to enable housing markets to work more efficiently, and a move away from the limited, project-based support of public agencies engaged in the production and financing of housing. Governments are advised to abandon their earlier roles as producers of housing and to adopt an enabling role of managing the housing sector as a whole. This fundamental shift is necessary if housing problems are to be addressed at a scale commensurate with their magnitude - to improve substantially the housing conditions of the poor - and if the housing sector is to be managed as a major economic sector. -from Author