A/HRC/7/16 page 12 F. Affordability 30. Across the world, the growing unaffordability of housing, land and property, is responsible for increasing the number of people who are homeless and have to resort to living in inadequate and insecure housing conditions. The inability or unwillingness of States to control speculation and rein in rising rental and home prices through appropriate intervention in the market, is a major obstacle to the implementation of the right to adequate housing. 31. Trends reveal that this affordability crisis is affecting not only the poor but also low-income groups and even the middle class. More and more people are suffering from the impact of rising prices of housing and land, especially in urban areas. This results in additional people defaulting on their rents or mortgages. 32. Many factors, including speculation on land and housing, explain this situation. Urban renewal, city beautification, and the creation of so-called world class cities have contributed to boosting property prices in cities, diverted land use for higher income groups and pushed the poor further to the periphery. 33. The resulting creation of spatially separated settlements for the rich and the poor in urban and rural areas, has at times been described by the Special Rapporteur as “urban and rural apartheid”. He has also warned about the fact that an increasing number of housing developments are being built for the wealthy, while the poor are being evicted or forced to live in slums or inadequate housing without access to basic civic services. Slums and squatter settlements arise in part due to the colossal gap in the supply of affordable housing in the formal sector. The Special Rapporteur is also concerned about reductions in public housing expenditure, pressures on rental housing, and declining housing and civic services subsidies for the poor. 34. The affordability crisis is further aggravated by the lack of housing finance for the bottom 20 to 25 per cent of the population. As pointed out in numerous country mission reports22 there is an urgent need for Governments to reorient, and make more flexible, housing finance institutions and instruments so that lower income groups can access resources. 35. The subprime market crisis that originated in the United States in 2007 has exposed the irresponsible practices of banks, real estate entities and local and national Governments and international financial institutions that continue to present the homeownership model as the panacea for the global housing crisis. The Special Rapporteur emphasises that this preference for market-driven homeownership is misplaced and undermines the housing rights of poor and middle-income groups across the world. A human rights-based approach would instead appear to call for a continuum of approaches, placing equal emphasis on different tenure options ranging from hostels, boarding homes, rental, cooperative, land sharing and so forth. 22 See for example E/CN.4/2004/48/Add.1, A/HRC/4/18/Add.2 or A/HRC/7/16/Add.2.