MEASURING THE POST-PANDEMIC SUSTAINABILITY OF URBAN LAND AFFORDABILITY IN NIGERIA USING MuCompE and DiBDAss MATRICES
KAZEEM .B. AKINBOLA & OLUFEMI .P. FIDUDUSOLA, Volume 4 Issue 1, 2020 Pages 21-39, Published: 2021-10-10
Abstract
Dilemma that involves comprehensive assessment of affordability issues which surround land as an invaluable life supporting resource, dates back to decades. Sadly, the unsustainability of the situation becomes prominent due to increasing urbanisation, demographic soaring, etc, leading to expensiveness and scarcity of land across all spatial divides, urban centres especially, where covid19 pandemic affects citizens’ land supply-demand transactional dynamics, phenomenally. Unfortunately, multi-dimensional frameworks that are to sustainably superintend the emerging unfavourable socio-economic scenarios associated with ‘pandemised 2020 era’, have been weakened, leading to reduced purchasing power and poor affordability in general. Three contexts were referenced: postcovid19’s land loan payment serviceability, postcovid19’s outright land price purchaseability and postcovid19’s real income earnings spendability on land, they helped to thoroughly examine, understand and address the affordability challenges through sustainable approaches. As a quantitative research, 17 measurement constructs were evolved, against which land issues that have to contend with affordability were gauged, vis-à-vis application of sustainability matrices of MuCompE and DiBDAss upon gathered data. Using purposive and simple random sampling techniques, 250 copies of 5- point Likert scaled questionnaire were distributed upon land officials, land transactions consultants and land developers of various categories, within the six states’ capital cities of Nigeria’s southwest. Out of the 211 copies of questionnaire that were retrieved, 193 were found to be valid, translating to 84% of distributionretrieval rate, thus were used for analysis, using normalisation scaling and decision ranking matrices, the outputs of which were further established, through mean items score tool, for measuring the degree to which sustainability is adversely affected, thus resulting to poor affordability of urban lands in Nigeria. Among the findings is that, sustainability criteria of land localisation, with p-th cumulative average mean item score of 8.3076 and land physiognomy, with p-th cumulative average mean item score of 7.5412 rank highest and lowest respectively, thus appeal most and least to stakeholders, leading to greatest and least strengths on the affordability of urban lands with respect to its three contexts. The research concluded that sustainability of urban land affordability is greatly affected by covid19 pandemic, hence canvassed for rich cocktail of carefully selected multiple sustainability criteria, with a great promise in succouring the potential adversity that unsustainable situation revolving around land affordability presents