One question I've always had is, Why is it so hard to have decent affordable housing?
To amplify. Technological progress has made virtually all essentials more abundant, cheaper and better,such as food, clothes, vehicles, appliances, air travel, everything. Curiously, housing in urban areas has simply grown more expensive. This is clearly an anomaly and I have no idea why it is so. The biggest culprit, everyone says, is land cost, because land is scarce. I really don't think it's all THAT difficult to find land. Let us say we wanted to house 1 crore people - 10 million - or about 50% of the metro population in the Mumbai area. If you assume 200 sq ft per person, we'll need about 200 sq km. The current density in slums, by the way, is about 20 sq ft per person. How much of a strain is 200 km on the city? Well, the metro area is about 4500 sq km. I don't think it would be very difficult to squeeze out 200 km out of that . It's less than 5%. And it would house everybody. With labour and material efficient building technology, even the cost should be less than what developers incur, if you standardized things. And if you assume the cost of construction to be Rs. 1000 per sq foot, the entire project would be 200,000 crore rupees. That's not a large number at Indian Economy scale. Plus, its an investment, not a hand out. Also, the fact that such housing developments will have to be far away from the city center shouldn't be a deal breaker. There is enough mass transit technology available. What might be the reasons why this isn't happening? Thanks and regards Narendra Shenoy On Sat, 27 Apr 2019 at 10:38, Pooja Sastry <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello all! > > I would love to hear what the members of this list think of affordable > housing - certainly from architects (hi Naresh!) and urban policymakers, > but also everyone here. > > In my work as an urban planner, we throw around ideas like affordability as > a function of land prices, minuscule floor areas, five times annual income, > construction quality and technique - but these, for me, completely miss the > mark. I'm a "millennial", renter, and likely never-homebuyer myself, and I > don't think it should be a stretch to see housing as an essential, > accessible (not to mention flexible and time-based) infrastructure instead > of a luxury. > > Thoughts? > > Pooja >
