Soaring rents and a four-hour commute: the misery of the Lagos housing crisis

The Nigerian megacity’s dynamic growth is outstripping its rental supply, and wages are not keeping up with rising costs

Every weekday before dawn, Oluwatobi Ogundipe leaves his small flat in Sango Ota, an industrial town in Ogun state, for a four hour commute to the glass towers of Lagos Island.

Despite working in one of Nigeria’s growing technology sectors, the 32-year-old product manager cannot afford to live any closer to his office.

“In 2023, I found a self-contained room on Lagos Island, close to my office, with its own toilet and kitchen, renting for ₦900,000 [£490] a year. After agency and agreement fees were added, the cost nearly doubled. I simply couldn’t afford it,” he says. “After exploring other options, I eventually decided to move to Sango Ota, where rent is cheaper.”

Across the sprawling metropolis, stories such as Ogundipe’s are common. Lagos is one of the African continent’s most powerful financial, cultural and entertainment centres. Its energy and vibrant nightlife earned it a reputation as a city that never sleeps. Chaotic yet magnetic, it is Africa’s most populous city after Cairo, with an estimated 22 million people, according to the state government. But the same dynamism powering its growth is also driving its housing market to breaking point.

Obafemi Hamzat, the state’s deputy governor, says Lagos faces persistent migration pressure, with about 6,000 new inhabitants arriving, and 3,000 leaving, each day. It brings extraordinary pressure on housing.

Rents across Lagos have surged far beyond wage growth. On the mainland, flats rented for about ₦500,000 two years ago now cost up to ₦2.5m a year. On the island, tenants say rents have tripled. The national minimum wage is ₦840,000 a year.

“This is a major issue,” says Emmanuel Joseph, a Lagos estate agent. “Even if they saved every naira, they still can’t afford a ₦2m apartment. That’s why we’re increasingly seeing people share apartments just to cope.”

For Ogundipe and others like him, this means a daily struggle between affordability and basic survival. “You sit in traffic for four to five hours, and before you realise, your legs start to numb. Sitting that long without stretching or crossing my legs eventually became a survival skill for me,” he says. “Sometimes when I get off the bus, I feel like I can barely feel my legs.”

Ayodeji Monsuru, a civil servant and father of two, faces a similar challenge. He works in Maryland in the central part of the mainland but lives in Ijaiye, one of the city’s outermost districts. Each morning, he wakes before sunrise for a commute that often exceeds two hours.

“I left New Oko Oba [in the north of Lagos city] two years ago because I couldn’t afford the rent increase from ₦300,000 to ₦500,000,” he says. “Going from house to house, it felt as if every landlord in Lagos had agreed in one meeting to raise their rents all at once.”

Monsuru earns about ₦240,000 a month but spends ₦3,500 weekly on transport to work. Rising housing costs, he says, are pushing professionals out of the city centre, and if the trend continues he may leave altogether.

“Sometimes I wonder if working in the city is even worth it,” he says.

Urban management experts say these struggles are symptoms of a broader structural crisis.

Prof Taibat Lawanson, a professor of urban management and governance at the University of Lagos, says Lagos has a housing shortage of more than 3.4 million units. “The city’s population is growing faster than its housing supply, pushing many people to relocate to cheaper areas, often by sharing flats or using other informal living arrangements,” she says.

“We’ve seen various itinerant practices: some people sleep in their offices, while others spend weekdays in Lagos and commute to families outside the city on weekends.”

But supply shortages tell only half the story. In some countries, such as the UK, housing analysts note that the shortage of affordable homes is made far worse by private developers prioritising high-end projects over affordable housing.

A similar trend is unfolding in Lagos, where high construction costs, soaring urban land prices, limited housing finance and weak incentives for affordable housing push developers toward luxury projects instead of affordable ones.

“Lagos is a very land-poor city, with insufficient land area to build; its economic development is pushing investors toward focusing on building premium housing,” Lawanson says, “because building affordable homes is far less profitable.”

This has fuelled a proliferation of luxury flats, even as people struggle to secure basic accommodation.

Emmanuel points to the popularity of short-term rentals. “Many landlords are converting their homes into short-let properties,” he says. “They can earn significantly more from short-term stays than from traditional long-term tenants.”

Platforms such as Airbnb have accelerated the trend, enabling marketing of properties direct to tourists and business travellers.

For one landlord in the suburb of Lekki, this transition is economically advantageous. “The idea of short lets, for instance, is that you could earn as much as you can from a long let within a period of a week or a month. For us, it’s simply business.”

But it is a business that effectively worsens shortages.

“When homes are converted into short-term rentals, fewer units remain available for long-term tenants,” Lawanson says. “That scarcity drives prices even higher.”

Barakat Odunuga-Bakare, special adviser on housing to the Lagos state governor, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

For now, Lagos’s residents adapt. Each morning, thousands make journeys like Ogundipe’s, through the city’s infamous traffic, leaving distant suburbs and neighbouring states into Africa’s most dynamic city.

“We all come to Lagos chasing something,” he says. “But these days, it feels like the city is slowly pushing us away.”