Lagos sells a dream it rarely delivers. People call it Africa’s crown jewel. Government officials speak of housing reforms that will reshape its skylines. A city where ambition soars and fortunes rise, Lagos has mastered the art of selective vision. It sees what it wants: success stories, luxury high-rises, upward economic graphs. But beyond the polished façade, the illusion shatters. But Lagos shows its truth in the spaces it hides. Beneath overpasses, in unlit corners, and at the edges of gleaming towers, thousands sleep on bare earth, without shelter or the dignity the city claims to uphold.
In the real Lagos, there are no mattresses puffed like clouds, only flattened cartons under Obalende bridge, slick with yesterday’s rain. Men curl themselves into the shape of grief. Children with eyes older than the century beg for coins at the foot of every traffic stoplight, where cars worth more than a lifetime of alms flash past without slowing. And when the city steps in, it does so with batons, kicking bodies off pavements in the name of cleanliness.
I came here for the promise. Chimamanda Adichie once called Lagos “a city in a state of shifting impermanence.” Yet, she also named it what it is: Nigeria’s cultural heartbeat, its commercial nerve, the place where dreams either live or die. For a young Nigerian, Lagos is what New York is to an American; it glitters with possibility. It was that promise that pulled me out of Ibadan—a city of brown roofs and generous silences—into this sprawling metropolis where fame feels one step away. When I finally scraped together enough to pay my first rent, I thought the worst was over. I was wrong. What followed was a parade of agency fees, caution fees, service charges, contract charges, add ethnic bias, and maybe the blood of a virgin, and you have the Lagos rental market. An agent looked me in the eye and said, “Your budget is too low.” My budget was a million naira.
If it isn’t obvious yet, Lagos has a housing crisis, one that feeds its homelessness crisis. And like the city itself, both are wrapped in the illusion of possibility, until the numbers gut you. This didn’t start with me. It began decades ago, written in the rubble of communities the city erased in the name of progress.
The first great erasure was Maroko. In her essay Who Really Belongs in Lagos?, Deborah Oludimu recalls the day in July 1990 when the military government under Colonel Raji Rasaki declared Maroko—a low-income settlement of more than 300,000 people—unfit for habitation. It was too flooded, too low-lying, a stain on the Lagos they wanted to build. At dawn, bulldozers rolled in; families fled in chaos. Some never made it out alive. Decades later, the land where Maroko once stood now gleams with luxury estates, the kind its former residents will never enter. They fought for justice in the courts, but compensation and resettlement remain, like the old slum itself, a memory.
The same story played out in Otodo Gbame. An ancestral fishing village in Lekki, home to the Egun people, wiped off the map in 2016–2017. Fire and bulldozers tore through the community, displacing 35,000 people; the government called it urban renewal. As if that was not enough, under Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, the Lagos government launched Operation Clean Lagos, a four-month campaign to purge street traders, squatters, and shanties from the city. Over time, enforcement teams dismantled stalls, and livelihoods were erased. Little to no compensation followed.
I imagine some of those displaced families are still scattered across a city that deserted them, still chasing dreams, even without a roof to dream under. The consequences ripple through housing, livelihoods, and basic human rights. People with nowhere to go spill into slums like Ajegunle and Makoko, or crawl under bridges. This crisis doesn’t stop at homelessness; it bleeds into crime. In 2017, Lagos recorded 50,975 criminal cases (the highest in the country), with theft, vandalism, and drug-related offenses leading the charts. The city bulldozes homes, then wonders why its streets grow dangerous. But wonder requires care, and the Lagos government does not care. Not while her officials sit in plush government houses, far above law and consequence, deaf to the groan of thousands surviving below.
Even our art is haunted by this violence. In The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos, Agbojedo, a fictional name masking the real Otodo Gbame, is erased from the city’s waterfront. The film follows Jawu, a young woman who stumbles on a bag of money, setting off calamities as her world collapses around her. Behind the fiction lies raw footage of the unfortunate events. These images undo the language of official reports, which reduce devastation to “redevelopment.” Here, the splintering of wood and scattering of lives cannot be euphemized. It is a story of resistance, of loss, and of a plea for repentance, a plea the city has yet to answer.
That plea echoes beyond the screen. Under Obalende, for instance, lies Karkashin Gada, a fragile settlement of homeless men who named it themselves, as though to claim dignity in a city that denies it. Most are Hausa migrants, driven from their homelands by banditry and insecurity, only to find another kind of war here. According to a BBC feature, Karkashin Gada lives under constant siege from the Lagos State Environmental Task Force. Raids are frequent; arrests come swiftly. Those caught risk fines of up to 20,000 naira, a week’s income for men who already own nothing. Every country has its homeless. But not every country wages war on them and calls it order.
Contrast this with California, where homelessness is the paradox of plenty. San Francisco, a city crowned by billion-dollar tech giants and glass towers, has become synonymous with tent cities sprawling across sidewalks. In 2023, over 38,000 people were unhoused in the Bay Area, driven by soaring rents and mental health struggles. Yet there are shelters, outreach programs, and flawed but visible debates about human worth.
New York City alone has by far the largest homeless population in the United States. Recent HUD-based surveys show that NYC accounts for roughly a fifth of all U.S. homelessness. In May 2025, about 106,875 people slept each night in city shelters, with many more unsheltered or “doubled up” elsewhere. In total, well over 350,000 New Yorkers lack stable housing on any given night. Indeed, homelessness in NYC has reached its highest levels since the 1930s, and it surged by over 50% between January 2023 and January 2024. Many of these people are asylum seekers or extremely poor families, and the crisis shows no signs of abating. The city’s response has largely been to funnel homeless New Yorkers into shelters (a “right to shelter” system) and to clear hundreds of encampments per year, effectively pushing the problem out of public view. In 2022–2024, the shelter census roughly doubled, from ~45,000 to ~89,000 people, reflecting this hidden growth.
By contrast, Lagos lacks an organized shelter system. Informal settlements sprawl across 70% of the city, and the government’s response has been draconian. Amnesty reports that ~50,000 people have been forcibly evicted from slums in just a few years. Lagos officials openly call those evicted “trespassers” and “illegal occupants”, explicitly refusing any housing assistance. In other words, unlike California, Los Angeles or New York (where police sweeps do occur, but most homeless are at least transported into shelters), Lagos simply erases homeless communities. Tens of thousands of people remain without shelter, yet no formal safety net exists for them.
While researching this piece, I stumbled on a website that looked promising: the ACEJO Foundation, an NGO with bold plans to build a homeless center in Ibeju-Lekki, a facility designed to house 500 young people between 18 and 29. The website boasts concept images and mission statements, a vision sketched in glossy renderings. But since 2022, there’s been no evidence of execution. One can hardly blame them; in a city where bureaucracy is a fortress, it’s easy to imagine the Lagos government refusing the clearance such a project would require. There are no homeless shelters in Lagos. None.
Make no mistake: middle-class workers will not escape this crisis unscathed. Already, young people linger in their parents’ homes longer than planned, and older ones hesitate to marry, not out of fear of love, but of rent that could swallow their future whole, of the bad economic conditions.
I will find a house eventually, hopefully before Lagos drains me of my patience. And still, I count myself among the lucky. For every person who claws through this gauntlet of agency fees and prejudice, dozens end up under bridges, on school verandas, or in shelters of nylon and wood. Their stories are the architecture of neglect, elements of a city that dreams of being a global hub but refuses to house its own. If a million naira cannot buy you a decent roof, what chance does the man with a wheelbarrow have? What kind of city swallows its poor and smiles about it? Lagos already knows.
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