Windhoek is Becoming a Rent City – And That Should Scare Us

Windhoek is changing – and not for the better.

Once a place where families could dream of owning an affordable home, the capital is now turning into a ‘rent city’.

More and more people are stuck renting, paying someone else’s bond, with no way out. You’ve felt it. We all have.

Salaries stay the same, but rent? It climbs like it’s training for the Olympics.

It’s not just rent eating us alive. Electricity tariffs went up again this year. Although NamPower wanted a 17% increase, the 3.8% approved by the regulator means more money is leaving your wallet for the same light bulb.

And don’t forget value-added tax (VAT), which quietly ticks upward on groceries, transport, and services while your salary remains stagnant.

Although public servants saw a 5% pay bump in 2024, inflation eats it whole while private sector workers haven’t seen an impactful increase in years.

According to the FNB Rent Price Index, the average rent in Windhoek was N$7 177 in the last quarter of 2023. For a simple two-bedroom flat, that’s about N$5 443 a month.

Want three bedrooms? You’re looking at nearly N$10 000.

Bigger than that? You’ll pay around N$22 703.

Here’s the kicker: Only 2.8% of Namibian households earn over N$20 000 a month.

Fast forward to today, the scarcity of rentals due to the growing Airbnb market has skyrocketed those figures.

So, how exactly are ordinary people supposed to survive?

Well, it’s no wonder young professionals spend half their salaries on rent. When rent swallows 40% to 60% of your salary, there’s nothing left for savings or emergencies.

A civil servant making N$15 000 to N$17 000 a month before tax can’t reasonably pay N$5 000 to N$7 000 for rent alone, let alone electricity, groceries, or transport.

Young folks are forced to commute from Okahandja. Families are squeezed into shacks, with around 67% of Windhoek’s urban residents now living in informal settlements due to formal rentals being out of reach.

We see stories of landlords hiking deposits, charging rent increases well above inflation, and pushing repair responsibilities onto tenants. All this, while offering substandard housing.

The audacity.

This isn’t just expensive. It’s unliveable. It’s dangerous. It’s exploitation.

But the question remains: Why do we keep approving these shiny, complex development projects, luxury flats and malls, while ordinary citizens can’t even afford serviced land to build a modest home or buy a house? The logic exceeds me.

The worst is, it’s not only tenants feeling the pain. Rent is killing businesses too. During the Covid-19 pandemic, countless small businesses shut.

Many still haven’t recovered, yet they continue to face absurd rent. Renting an office in Windhoek can cost more than a flat, and entrepreneurs are walking away because the overheads simply do not make sense.

Small enterprises, restaurants, cafés, tech ventures, creative studios and other businesses capable of creating jobs through innovation are suffocated under rent.

In a country with dangerously high youth unemployment, encouraging young people to be innovative or start their own ventures without addressing rent is hollow talk.

Where exactly are these new ventures supposed to operate when commercial rentals are eating them alive? This makes the issue bigger than rent. It’s about accountability.

To date, there is no law governing rent control. Although a Rent Control Board was established in 2018, it has remained inactive, as its functions depend on the rent control bill.

The bill, which has been before the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development since 2017, aims to regulate rental fees and protect tenants. However, seven years later, it’s still “under review”.

While the bill rolls like tumbleweed in the desert wind, rent keeps rising and landlords keep cashing in. With ordinary Namibians left out in the cold, let’s draw lessons from Rwanda, where rent hikes are capped based on wage growth and public-private partnerships, making affordable mixed-income housing a reality.

Botswana subsidises first-time renters and caps municipal rentals for low- and middle-income families.

Rent isn’t just pricing people out. It’s pricing businesses out. It’s pricing out hope. While rent becomes a get-rich-quick scheme for a few, the city stops being a home for the many.

Youth unemployment stays high, and families stay stuck. It’s not just frustrating, it’s exhausting. Windhoek is our capital. It’s supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just survival.

But at this rate, the dream of living in Windhoek is becoming less about a home, and more about a hustle.

And if you feel like you’re working harder but getting nowhere, you’re not imagining it. You are living it. That, right there folks, is the system failing you.

– Martha Haludilu is an information and diplomacy specialist.

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