p>To date, there has been no research done on rental housing in Angola and as this report will show, there is no government policy concerning rental housing, nor any legal framework. This report therefore provides a first effort to get an understanding of the magnitude and characteristics of rental housing in Luanda. Being a scoping study, this report will open as many questions as it will answer. While providing some first baseline information, it will indicate where future research should focus and how research results should be used to influence housing policy and housing programs. Given the Government of Angola’s increasing interest and willingness to seriously address the nation’s housing problems, this research comes at an opportune moment and has the potential to make a contribution to planning and implementation by introducing rental housing as an important housing sector.
The present study focuses on beginning to answer the first two points, in selected peri-urban informal settlements in Luanda, the capital of Angola. The present study will also create a basis for using other longer-term, large-scale studies being undertaken by DW (in the city as well as other urban areas of the country) to assess the magnitude of the informal rented housing sector, understand how the urban housing market is evolving in Angola’s rapidly growing cities, how this evolution is shaping urban development, and how that urban development is reconfiguring opportunity-structures within the informal economy. The long-term aim will be to identify ways that can be used to improve tenants’ housing options as well as ways that can be used to assist re-investment in housing and improve the availability of housing.
