Baku, Azerbaijan: For Karnataka’s Koraga tribal community, the path to owning a house remains long and uphill. It is shaped as much by entrenched caste hierarchies as by policy gaps. The UN-Habitat World Cities Report 2026, released on 19 May, underlined this and many other harsh realities of housing inequality, accessibility, and exclusion faced by communities globally.
For the Koraga community, recognised as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG), limited access to education and structural exclusion make government schemes out of reach.
“In India, both Dalits and Muslims are often discriminated against when accessing housing, leading to their segregation,” said the report.
The report was released at the Baku Olympic Stadium, where the World Urban Forum (WUF13) drew over 40,000 participants from across the world.
During the report’s inauguration, Anaclaudia Rossbach, UN secretary general and executive director of UN-Habitat, spoke about mounting global housing pressures. She spoke about the deepening housing crisis engulfing 40 per cent of the world population—around 3.4 billion people—driven by unaffordable prices, housing shortages, poor-quality accommodation and lack of access to adequate urban services like water and sanitation.
The report briefly mentioned the initiative “Restoration of Dignity and Human Rights of Indigenous Tribal Community in Karnataka” by ActionAid India alongside the Koraga Federation and Samagra Grameena Ashram (SGA), which helped Koraga families navigate state housing programmes.
The report also pointed to the looming urban shift, warning that if left unaddressed, it could trigger an unprecedented crisis. By 2050, cities across the world are expected to absorb an additional 2 billion people. The surge, the report warns, would place immense pressure on housing systems already strained by rapid urbanisation, spiralling land values, widening inequality and climate change.
“Climate-related hazards are projected to destroy 167 million homes by 2040,” the report reads.
Also read: Policymakers and global experts ask a question in Baku: why is housing unaffordable in India?
Different cities, different crises
There is no single template for cities across the world. This is how American economist Jeffery D Sachs cautioned against imposing Western urban models as universal solutions for the rest of the world. He spoke about how urban challenges are deeply uneven across the regions, driven by economics, land and demography.
“When we talk about the move now for smaller households and so forth, that’s very much a Latin American phenomenon,” Sachs said during his panel. “For instance, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the urban population is going to be more than double and that raises a completely different set of issues in terms of urban space, land, design and construction and in a completely different economic context as well.”
The report highlights worsening rental affordability in India, with rent rising from 20 per cent of household income in 2010 to 26 per cent in 2023. At the same time, access to housing loans has expanded, with the share of households taking loans increasing from 20 per cent in 2010 to 35 per cent in 2023.
WUF 13 in Baku brought together a wide range of voices, including academics, UN officials and urban experts from across the world. Among them was Jeffrey Sachs, who unravelled the global conversation on the future of cities and inequality with his nuanced perspective on uneven realities shaping the urban landscape.
“We are really not dealing with a uniform global crisis. We are dealing with different dynamics in different parts of the world. And I would like us to put some focus on the challenges in Africa and what I think are lesser but very significant challenges remaining in South Asia and Southeast Asia,” Sachs said.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)