Building the Just City in Tanzania: Essays on Urban Housing 1. Introduction Financing affordable and adequate housing in Tanzania is a daunting task given the low-income level of most households; increasingly high demand for affordable and adequate housing as rapid urbanization takes place; and ever rising construction costs leading to high housing cost. Housing financ­ing as perceived in this paper covers more than mortgage finance and hous­ing micro-finance. A wider perception of housing finance to include finance for physical and social infrastructure as well as access to land is adopted so as to capture initiatives towards financing affordable and adequate housing in the Tanzanian context. This wider concep­tion of housing finance is also in line with perceiving housing as being more than a‘ready-made’ shelter. It includes physical and social infrastructure to en­hance livability and support livelihood activities in the housing areas. As con­ceived by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme(UN-Habitat) in the Habitat Agenda(UNCHS, 1996), housing adequacy takes into account affordability 1 .However, affordability in relation to financing is more than ac­cess to and the cost of housing finance. It is about the price of housing which reflects the costs of production and a function of supply and demand in the housing market. This paper provides an account of hous­ing finance in Tanzania in a changing political and economic context during the six decades after independence in December 1961. Within the changing context, the government persistently pursued policies for financing afford­able and adequate housing; and pro­moted home ownership. Government efforts in the last decade have put in place an enabling regulatory framework and a market-based mortgage system, including a mortgage liquidity facility to grow a mortgage market, but so far, the prevailing market interest rates im­pede most households to afford hous­ing mortgage. However, considering affordability as a function of housing price and financing(mortgage) cost, shortage of affordable housing units is a real present challenge to the growth of the mortgage market. Self-financing and incremental con­struction dominates housing produc­1 See the Habitat Agenda, 1996, as quoted also by the National Human Settlements Devel­opment Policy, 2000,“Adequate shelter, means more than a roof over ones head, it means adequate privacy, adequate space, physical accessibility, adequate security of tenure, structural stability and durability, adequate lighting, heating and ventilation, adequate basic infrastruc­ture such as water, sanitation and waste management facilities, suitable environmental quality and health related factors and adequate and accessible location with regard to work and basic facilities, all of which should be available at an affordable cost”(UNCHS, 1996) 101