Measuring and Explaining Housing Wealth Inequality in Urban Nigeria: Evidence, Theory, and Policy Implications

This dissertation measures housing wealth inequality across urban Nigeria and develops a theoretical framework for understanding its determinants, dynamics, and implications for estate management policy and social equity. Housing is the primary store of household wealth for urban Nigerians who own property, making housing wealth distribution a central dimension of overall wealth inequality, yet it has not been systematically measured or theoretically examined in the Nigerian context. The dissertation makes four connected original contributions: the first comprehensive measurement of housing wealth inequality using the Gini coefficient, top decile shares, and other distributional statistics, constructed from a combination of primary survey data on residential property ownership and values from 2,500 households across eight Nigerian cities and existing National Bureau of Statistics household survey data; an original theoretical framework explaining housing wealth inequality as the product of three interacting mechanisms, specifically the access inequality mechanism through which housing finance and land administration barriers exclude low-income households from owner-occupation; the spatial appreciation inequality mechanism through which infrastructure investment systematically benefits already-wealthy neighbourhoods; and the intergenerational transmission mechanism through which parental housing wealth determines children's housing market starting position; a long-run historical analysis of how housing wealth inequality has evolved since independence using constructed archival measures; and a simulation model examining how proposed policy interventions including land documentation reform, social housing expansion, and mortgage market deepening affect the distributional trajectory of housing wealth. Recommendations for equity-oriented property policy are derived from the integrated analysis. Keywords: housing wealth inequality, wealth distribution, property ownership, urban Nigeria, social equity.