Assessment of the relationship between housing quality and income in urbanizing city of Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria

Abstract

The study focused on the connection between the standard of housing and household income in Nigeria's Ado-Ekiti. The population of Ado-Ekiti is expanding and includes a wide range of socioeconomic categories. The study adopted a primary method of data collection, respondents who are landlords or the oldest tenants were selected randomly to give answers to 1500 structural questionnaires distributed in the study area, and a total of 1311 responses were obtained. The study was categorized into three zones: Urban Core, Transitional and Peri-phery. The variables and data were captured with statistical tables. The study found out that 62% of respondents in the Urban Core earn less than the minimum wage as against 9.05 in the Peri-phery. Also, in the Core Area, 37.3%, 40.0%, 34.6%, 32.2%, 32.9% and 47.5% of roof, windows, doors, walls, floors and ceilings respectively were bad. The hypothesis formulated is that there is no significant relationship between housing quality and income level. Using Pearson Product Correlation shows that r-value (0.530) is higher than the r-tabulated r-value (0.195), this indicates that there is a strong correlation between the quality of housing and residents' income levels. The study concluded that income level and fund availability will always affect the realization of good quality housing, the study recommended that strong government intervention in housing the urban poor must be improved; development agencies and private developers should go into funding building maintenance most especially at the urban core.