Financing Housing Justice: collaborative publication launched at the World Urban Forum
The latest publication of the Hub for Housing Justice, “Financing Housing Justice: Imagining a financing architecture that promotes more just and sustainable housing systems,” aims to bring the housing rights and financing discussions together, providing a starting point to transform the finance architecture in ways that promote housing as a vehicle for fairer and more sustainable societies.
A financing architecture that delivers housing justice
This Provocation is the result of a series of collaborative workshops convened by the Hub in late 2025 and early 2026. Partners and key allies of the Hub came together to build a roadmap for housing justice actors to engage with financing questions and, in turn, enhance their ability to influence decision-making and policy processes on housing. The publication builds on a first series of Provocations that advance a collective understanding of the notion of housing justice, and reflects the working groups’ efforts to answer a series of questions on the financing mechanisms needed to transform housing systems.
What principles should guide a finance architecture that promotes housing justice?
Advancing housing systems that are anti-discriminatory and democratic, that create infrastructures for social and climate justice, and that expand housing futures requires a finance architecture driven by a new set of principles. This ranges from being more flexible, participatory, risk-taking or circular, to prioritising redistribution and permanent affordability as well as collective forms of housing production.
What type of actions can help advance these principles?
The provocation lists a wide range of actions, including regulations, incentives, partnerships, loan provisions, land use planning, and taxation instruments that bring these principles to life, offering concrete steps to take by policy, finance, research, and civil society actors to finance housing justice.
What are key obstacles to undertaking these actions and how to overcome them?
If we know what is needed, why are we not seeing change? Reflections on lack of trust, rigid credit systems, counterproductive incentives and other elements of the current finance architecture provide insights on the main challenges to delivering finance for housing justice. Experiences captured in the provocation, however, also demonstrate that these obstacles can be overcome. From South Africa to the United Kingdom and India, from Brazil to Eastern Europe, and from Chile to Zimbabwe, they offer useful lessons on how to bring more justice-oriented housing efforts to scale.
WUF13 Launch
The official launch of the publication took place at the 13th World Urban Forum (WUF13) in Baku, Azerbaijan, in May 2026. It spoke to WUF13’s main theme, “Housing the world: Safe and resilient cities and communities,” and the focus on the need to address the global housing crisis, including through “a new deal on housing finance.”
During the event, various partners and key allies of the Hub presented the key messages of the provocation, drawing from their own experiences in crafting alternative financing approaches to deliver housing. The discussion also featured reflections from representatives of multilateral development banks, international agencies, and philanthropy for socio-environmental justice on the role that these actors play in calling for more effective finance mechanisms as well as how to collaborate to tackle the challenges that lie ahead.
Beginning a journey together
We cannot advance housing justice without transforming the financing mechanisms that shape the provision of housing. This collaborative publication provides a starting point to bridge the siloes between the housing rights and financing debates and imagine a new and better financing architecture.