A total of 22,000 people are waiting for public housing in the North. In its annual report, the Housing Executive said 10,366 of those applicants were classified as in need of accommodation urgently due to homelessness or intimidation, for example.
Mr Sid McDowell, the chairman of the executive, said that 44,000 properties across the North were unfit for habitation.
Mr McDowell said that with more people living into old age, the executive was spending more on home adaptations. In the past five years, the number of homes needing such adaptations had risen from 600 to 2,000, with a cost close to £26 million sterling. However, he said that even that level of investment "did not go far enough towards meeting the ever-increasing demand".
The executive celebrated its 30th anniversary yesterday. Mr McDowell said it had built more than 80,000 new homes, housed more than 500,000 people, improved 350,000 homes in the private sector and sold over 90,000 homes to sitting tenants.
"If you look back over 30 years, we've had 500,000 homes allocated without a single finding of religious discrimination. We have much to celebrate," he said.