Covid-19: 52% of urban residents worry over rent insecurity – report

By Joy Obakeye

It appears the biting impact of the coronavirus pandemic is fast showing it’s status as over 50% of urban households who live in one form of rental structure are worried about paying their next due rent, a survey by the National Bureau of Statistics has shown.

The survey tagged Covid-19 impact monitoring, is a way the NBS with support from the World Bank, monitors the economic impact of the pandemic and other shocks across Nigeria.

In its July edition released on Tuesday, the statistics agency revealed that the major reason for the insecurity by households is due to reduced income, Daily Times gathered.

Giving further breakdown of the survey, the NBS noted that the insecurity could represent an iminent crisis for many of the households.

“Albeit, a disproportionately urban phenomenon is becoming challenging: more than half of renting households report being worried they will be unable to make their next rental payment.

“In urban areas, 23% of all households are rent insecure (worried about being able to pay their next rental payment) which represents nearly 52% of urban households who rent their dwelling.

“An imminent crisis for many of these households, as 56% of rent insecure households have a rental payment due within the next month.

“The main cause for rent insecurity is reduced income (85% of rent insecure households),” it noted.

However, the report stated that the households will now have to choose between paying their rent or buying foodstuffs due to “an increase in the price of food and non-food items (58% and 50%, respectively).

This suggests that renting households are facing a situation where they must make difficult trade-offs between paying rent and buying food.”

The reportshowed that the economic shocks have continued to affect Nigerians, with little improvement since April/May.

It added that the most “widely experienced shocks in the country continue to be increases in the prices of both major food items consumed (affecting 90% of households) and farming/business inputs (affecting 64% of households).

“Distressingly, the share of households experiencing these two shocks has increased since April/May.

Households continue to experience job losses, disruption to farming, livestock, and fishing activities, as well as a fall in the price of farming/business outputs, although the share of households reporting these shocks seems to have dropped marginally, compared to April/May,” it showed.

Another major concern raised by the report is the fact that households who are experiencing the shocks are resorting to other sources for survival.

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“In the absence of social protection, many households are resorting to coping mechanisms that can have further longer term negative impacts, such as reducing food consumption (69% of households who experienced shocks) and drawing down their savings (29% of households who experienced shocks).

Indeed, compared to April/May, the share of households reducing their food consumption as a coping mechanism actually increased, potentially signaling that households have exhausted other less severe coping mechanisms. Additionally, about 33% of households who experienced shocks are diversifying their income generation portfolio as a coping mechanism.