There’s also a BS article on Hiraan that got re-published elsewhere, where the journalist completely misleads people. I saw it quoted by someone else under HornAristocrat tweet, trying to frame Mogadishu as having a housing crisis. But the whole piece is written from the perspective of an IDP complaining they can’t afford or access housing. Then it jumps to accusations about speculation, which I’ll explain below is not true at all.
@Midas @Neptune and
@Barkhadle1520 , I’ll add this last point that really needs to be highlighted. There’s something uniquely interesting about Somalia’s real estate and construction sector compared to most places: it’s demand-driven, not speculative, and it’s financed directly instead of being fueled by debt.
It’s not controlled by wealthy landowners monopolizing land to exclude others or drive up prices for profit. Housing in Somalia is community-driven and demand-led people build homes to live and work in, not to create ghost towers. In other words, Somali housing reflects capital formation, not speculation.
Take Rugsaan Village, for example. Some people here wrongly criticized it as some kind of luxury diaspora project, but in reality, it was built to meet the growing demand in Hargeisa from the expanding middle class. The developers even said themselves:
“Waxa aanu dhisaynaa guryo ardayda jaamacaduhu iibsan karaan” (we are building houses that university students can buy). They also explained how it’s meant to relieve overcrowding in Hargeisa by expanding housing into new areas, designed so students could purchase once they enter the workforce.
Here’s the video (3:00 mark):
Similarly, as @Barkhadle mentioned before, one developer of a high-rise in Mogadishu explained in an interview that nearly all the units had been reserved before construction was even finished. That shows just how strong middle-class housing demand really is.
This also helps explain why most urban Somalis live in improved housing today, as surveys have shown, the sector is directly tied to real demand, not speculation.
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Another thing that shows urbanization in Somalia isn’t chaotic, unplanned/ informal is that most people actually hold registered land certificates. That legal framework helps explain why housing in Somali cities is usually laid out on a dense, fine-grained grid, with proper zoning and even green spaces or courtyards built into neighborhoods:
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This is from an article written years ago that describes how most suburban houses in Somali cities are villas, many of which follow designs that go back to the pre-1991 era. It also highlights how housing has generally been built on properly allocated plots of land:
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I spoke about it with when talking about the housing in Ogaden suburbs how there is a stylistic uniformity and formation across Somali regions:
And lastly Somalia’s construction industry is almost entirely powered by a domestic labor force, local expertise, and a supply chain of materials produced inside the country. They don’t rely on importing most materials or bringing in low-wage foreign workers like in Singapore, the UAE, or Dubai, where entire parallel societies of underpaid poor migrant laborers live in cramped, exploitative conditions.