When housing is more than houses the center of Tanzanian housing policy with the intensity of informal realities. Housing policy has become irrelevant within the national agenda The Tanzanian experts interviewed elo­quently denounce that national hous­ing policy is non-existent, and lament that the housing sector is so languid and incipient in the national portfolio as compared with other economic and social agendas. Some condemn that housing is lumped together with land issues(Kironde, 2021), that it is wrong to confuse the constitutional right to property with the right to housing(Ny­iti, 2022), and key regulations get stuck in the pipeline or even reversed(Komu, 2022). Some seem to concur that the national government misunderstands the power of housing policy to drive the economy and decry the lack of national leadership and action in the housing sector. A languid housing sector that strug­gles to make itself relevant alongside other sectoral policies is disheartening because housing is probably the one of the main instruments for growth and social development an emerging na­tion has(Carrizosa, 2020). Around the world, housing construction is often made into an engine of the national economy. It generates long upstream and downstream value chains making it a prime contributor to a country’s GDP. More strategically still, the housing sec­tor has ripple effects in the local econ­omy. Housing production, be it formal or informal, plays this economic role, with different levels of legibility, spread, and strength. Let one not zoom out of view that most of housing production is not formally produced, and so the bulk of the economic impact housing generates is not formal 2 . This implies that there is a steady flow of resources from the informal to the formal, a sort of reverse“trickle down”. Such“trick­le up” processes are strong, healthy, permanent, and long standing. This is in fact how most of the tissue of our cities is made. Small but permanent and widespread interventions. Incre­mentally becoming better, completing, formalizing. If the housing stock and the housing market is mostly self-built (informal), then housing policy should center itself on these realities, end ex­ploit its possibilities. To do otherwise is to ensure its irrelevance. 2 An interesting case that took advantage of the amount of building materials the informal self-builders consume is“Patrimony Today”, an upgrading program spearheaded by Cemex, a multinational cement producer(IDB, 2011). 57