Housing policy needs to find ways for people to benefit maximally from their own choices

Mumbai’s obsession is space. Everywhere, on the crowded roads, the overcrowded trains, the cubbyhole apartments, the many chawls and slums, the singular obsession that unites everyone is space. It is an obsession that afflicts the rich as it does the poor. ... The obsession with space produces its own knowledge. Practically everyone in this city knows the meanings of words that make no sense to regular folks elsewhere — words such as FSI, and TDR, and CRZ. You might think these are acronyms. Well, not to a real Mumbaikar..

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FSI LIBERALISATION

It was on a central feature of this Development Plan 2034, its proposal to free up the restrictive FSI regime. FSI, meaning Floor Space Index, can be roughly described as a measure of how many floors one is allowed to build in a certain space. The new plan will allow builders to build more floors in most places in the city. The inspirations that one speaker cited are New York and Hong Kong. The comparisons are apt because both of those cities are island megapolises like Mumbai. ... The median household income is Rs 20,000, the DP says, but the lowest price for even a single bedroom public housing unit starts from Rs 14 lakh. Needless to say, the average Mumbaikar cannot afford to buy or rent a proper house in Mumbai.

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AFFORDABLE HOUSING

The draft DP claims to be inclusionary in approach. However, although it acknowledges the need for affordable housing, it doesn’t provide any real solution. There is a suggestion that 10 per cent of built up area in the form of small tenements should be handed over to the municipal corporation in all plots over 2,000 sq m. These would be given to people displaced by government projects and those from the “economically weaker sections”.

This sounds wholly inadequate. It’s not as if all existing buildings in the city are likely to be torn down for new ones to be built. This provision would kick in only in the case of fresh developments or redevelopments. Given that at least 60 per cent of the city currently lives in slums or chawls — and there are more people coming in every day — there’s no way this will solve the issue. ... Nor will higher FSIs. Tall buildings, called towers in the lingo, require money to put up and money to sustain.