The houses are too close together. That’s the first thing my mind feels when I think of my family’s home. It wasn’t always like this; two years prior my mind cast itself to open spaces whenever I considered the house. To the back, outside the kitchen door, the view from the balcony used to be a wide expanse of green, grass as far as the next house, a shanty from which a local vulcanizer operated.

Then the clearing started. The foundations were laid. And as that house grew, brick-by-brick, we had to start keeping our, now late, dog away from the back of the house because she hated the workers fiercely. (They didn’t do anything to her, she just didn’t like other people.) Now, if you stand on our balcony and reach out, your fingers will graze this new balcony behind us.

Lagos State’s 2005 Building Regulations state that the setback of residential buildings (essentially the distance between two buildings) should be at least three metres. I assure you, even if you include the wall valiantly standing between this home and the one I have been talking about all essay, the distance is not up to half of the requirement.

And that’s just the back. On the right hand, there’s a ‘duplex’ standing in utmost aggression across the entirety of one side of our home. The metal bars across my window prevent me from doing so but if I get annoyed enough, one day, a hanger will be all I need to grab the shirts spread across the outside railings of that house. At our front, there is what I assume is a flat of shortlets. Thankfully, this is far away enough that we can still feel the good wind when it rains.

This situation isn’t peculiar to my family’s home. It’s an unplanned estate - just plots of land available in the past for a good price and once upon a time, moving companies who were willing to drive there. So, houses could just spring up in any random section, complete with their own boreholes Like many places in Nigeria, the government’s duties are a non-issue for their enforcers, all necessary actions nonexistent or paid to slack off somewhere. The constrictive construction continues. The hotel in the vicinity escapes by owning the strips of the land around itself.