The Chairman, Millard Fuller Foundation (MFF), Mr Samuel Odia, has called for a new approach to Housing deficit bedeviling the country.
Odia, who made the call in a statement Monday in Abuja, said the focus should be on the emergence of new towns rather than embarking on units of housing estate
“The point I am trying to make is that perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of new towns rather that just two- or three-thousand unit housing estate projects.
“A target of 500,000 homes spread across six zones is almost 100,000 per zone (on average),” he said.
According to him, a target of 500,000 homes spread across zones is the equivalent of a new town in each geopolitical zone of the country.
Odia said that this would bring about a new Nigeria, adding that there should be revolutionary solutions to perennial housing problems confronting the country.
He added housing deficit appeared to have defied conventional solutions for decades in the country.
“We all know the problems of the Nigerian housing industry; the environment craves for radical solutions. It craves for innovation. It craves for change,” he said.
He stated that the solution that would solve the country local housing problems was not far from the citizenry, stressing that in every state across the country there are examples of entrepreneurs doing great things on a small scale.
“What we need to do is find them out and scale their activities and going forward, MFF aims to be a major contributor to Nigeria’s stock of truly affordable homes,” he said.
He said that it hoped to not just to build houses affordably but would build environmentally smarter houses and communities, affordable to the common man.
He said that in Nasarawa State, it would help to build new towns, interconnected by road, rail and other means of transportation and connected directly to the Federal Capital Territory.
“We have a vision that in less than ten years’ time, I can decide to live as far away as Lafia, join the bullet train line that runs along this back corridor and be at my office in Maitama within an hour. (NAN)