Imagine spending years servicing a mortgage, finally settling into a home you planned to pass down to your children — and then being told to pack your bags because the building might collapse. That is exactly what is happening right now in Athi River, where hundreds of homeowners at Karibu Homes are staring down eviction notices, crumbling walls, and a developer who still hasn’t answered for any of it.
The Cracks That Exposed Everything
The Karibu Homes development sits across 63 apartment blocks in phases one and two, housing 500 residential units. On the surface, it looked like the kind of project that was supposed to democratise homeownership for Kenya’s middle class. Beneath that surface — quite literally — the story is far uglier. In blocks M, N, and P, locally known as the London blocks, vertical cracks tear through expansion joints from rooftop straight down to the ground floor. These aren’t hairline fractures you’d dismiss as cosmetic. They are visible both inside and outside the buildings, and they have been growing in the homes of families who have lived there for over eight years.
Five government agencies conducted an assessment and arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion: there are structural defects in these buildings. “Out of the assessment done by five government agencies, they drew recommendations which pointed to the structural defect and everything to do with the structure of the buildings,” said Kenneth Njukira, one of the affected homeowners. The report doesn’t whisper this finding — it states it plainly, and it points directly to liability. Yet here is the outrage: rather than accept those findings, the developer’s representatives are pushing for a separate, independent assessment. A second opinion, bought and paid for by the very party being accused.
Families Are Already Packing
While the developer stalls, real families are folding up their lives. Samuel Kopi’s household is already in the middle of a forced move, packing memories they never intended to box up. Kopi bought into Karibu Homes with a vision that extended beyond himself — he wanted a home his children would inherit. “I was so happy. I thought that this one I will pass it to my generation. I don’t know where to go and what to do because I am servicing a loan that I have not cleared. Then I have to move out. Children are in school around…” he said, his words trailing off in the way that only real grief does.
This is the part that official narratives always flatten: the losses here are not just financial. Children are being uprooted from schools, from neighbourhoods, from the only homes they have ever known. Families are being asked to absorb a crisis they did not create, while continuing to service mortgages on properties they can no longer safely occupy. Mary Rukwaro, another homeowner, put it with brutal clarity: “We feel that he needs to be accountable because it seems like the properties were not properly built. Basically, you own a home but are getting nothing out of it.”
The County Knew — and the Paper Trail Proves It
The Machakos County government’s Department of Physical and Land Use Planning has issued a formal enforcement notice against the developer. The notice cites two damning contraventions that should have never been allowed to reach this point in the first place.
Read that again. People have been living in these buildings for eight-plus years, paying mortgages, raising children, building lives — in structures that were never legally certified for occupation. The question that demands an answer is not just how the developer got away with this, but how county oversight mechanisms failed hundreds of families so completely and for so long.
What Happens Next Matters for Every Kenyan Homeowner
As the eviction deadline tightens and the long rains begin to gather over Athi River, the homeowners of Karibu Homes are caught in an impossible position. Staying means risking their physical safety in buildings that government engineers have flagged as structurally compromised. Leaving means abandoning homes they are still paying for, with no guarantee of compensation, retrofitting, or justice. Njukira and others are demanding one thing above all else: that the findings of the five-agency report be acted upon, not buried under a developer-commissioned counter-report, so that owners can eventually return to homes that are safe.
This case is a stress test for Kenya’s property sector and its regulatory frameworks. If a developer can sell 500 units without a certificate of compliance, watch cracks split the walls, and then respond to a government report by commissioning their own — and face no immediate legal consequence — then no Kenyan mortgage holder is truly secure. The families of Karibu Homes are not just fighting for their homes. They are fighting for the principle that accountability in housing must mean something real.
