Housing affordability for public servants in Bauchi State, Nigeria

Abstract

Housing is a vital part of human expenditure that accomplishes the basic need and a deep impact on the quality of life and the output of man. In spite of the generally known importance of housing and various efforts shown towards making sure that there is affordable housing made available to majority of the people in Nigeria, a large percentage of public servants in the country still do not have access to decent housing at affordable cost. As a result, most public servants in the county live in housing conditions that constitute disrespect to human dignity and with social and economic implications. Many researchers have being battling with the problems of housing affordability and it was recorded that the concept of affordable housing is mainly based on three concepts such as income, purchase and repayment affordability. This prompted the researcher to identify the level of housing affordability as the first objectives of these findings for public servants in the study area and the second objective was to study the influence of demographic factors on housing affordability among public servant using the federal polytechnic Bauchi staff as a case study. A survey was carried out in the institution using a questionnaire distributed among 250 respondents in the study area of which 200 were returned but only 196 were valid. The Residual Income Method was used to examine the level of housing affordability among public servants in relation to their income/salary while the cross tabulation analysis, Pearson chi square analysis and CRAMER'S V was used to determine the influence of the demographics factors on housing affordability. Due to the observation and information gathered from the study area, the results from the first objective shows that quit a high number of the respondents cannot afford the kind of houses available in the study area due to the low rate of house hold income, while data for the second objective shows that out of all variable tested, the household income, grade level, age and the educational qualification are having a very strong influence on housing affordability in the study area except the Number of children and Years of service that holds a week influence on their ability to own a house among the public servants in Bauchi State Federal Polytechnic Staff. Aside all that, the finance system is not helping matters in terms of mortgage loan and the system of repayment period, so the only option that seems to be an alternative used to address the problem is the personal savings which always take very long term duration.