Unreal Real Estate : Sky Is Limit for Bombay Land Prices
By most standards, Bombay is one of the poorest cities in the world. More than half of its 8 million people live in squatters’ slums. About 350,000 of them live on sidewalks.
Yet, real estate in prime areas such as Malabar Hill and Nariman Point is among the most expensive on earth, as expensive as in Hong Kong or Manhattan.
To rent a comfortable apartment here, one must usually pay, in advance and under the table, several hundred thousand dollars in “black money.”
The U.S. Consulate in Bombay does not pay black money, but it does pay as much as $5,000 a month for the apartments of junior officers. One diplomat, a New Yorker, said of his apartment here: “It is a nice apartment with a small garden. But I keep thinking that you could set yourself up in Manhattan for much less.”
$2-Million Deposit
Office space is no less expensive. The Bank of America recently considered expanding into a nearby building until it was asked for a $2-million deposit on 12,000 square feet of space. The bank declined.
The high costs can be attributed, in part, to geography. Bombay was once an island in the Arabian Sea, but now, after much draining and filling, it is a narrow peninsula. Thus, it has developed as a linear city, and the most expensive land, along with the government offices and most of the cultural facilities, is at the very tip of the peninsula.
An admirable suburban railway system was built by the British during their rule to bring office workers and government clerks to the business district. But the system was designed to accommodate no more than 150 million passengers a year, not the 750 million that use it today. Now it is widely detested, and dangerous besides.
Tragedies Not News
“Commuters fall off and are cut to pieces before the benumbed eyes of their fellow passengers,” according to Times of India columnist Prem Shankar Jha, “but such tragedies have long since ceased to be news.”
Commuting to the inner city by bus or any other form of transport takes several hours, for all traffic must pass through a constricted corridor.
Bombay, it has been said, is like a wine bottle with a narrow neck. “And it needs to be decanted,” Bombay architect Charles Correa remarked.
Twenty years ago, Correa drew up an ambitious project to save the city by moving most government office buildings and several major businesses across the bay to a development site on the mainland. The plan was approved by the Maharashtra state government in 1969 but has since been virtually ignored.
Political Insensitivity
A graphic example of political insensitivity to the city’s problems took place in March at a slum called Sanjay Gandhi Nagar in Cuffe Parade, a wretched cluster of 300 huts in the shadow of several of Bombay’s most modern office buildings. Policemen and municipal workers arrived one morning with bulldozers and trucks and, in a matter of hours, cleared the area of the huts and the 1,500 people who lived in them.
Ram Pher Barai, 35, a cook who had lived there, told a reporter: “My hut was very strong and wouldn’t come down easily. They tied a rope to it and pulled it down with a truck.”
In any other city, Barai would have lived in the servants’ quarters in his employer’s house, which was near the slum. But in Bombay, Barai needed the hut because his employer had leased the servants’ quarters to a middle-class family.
Barai said he came to Bombay in 1965 from the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India. “Our family had less than an acre of land, and there were seven brothers,” he said.
From Hut to Lean-to
Since their huts were destroyed, Barai and many of his neighbors have moved into a lean-to set up on the sidewalk across the street from where they had lived.
Their plight generated a wave of public sympathy after one of India’s most famous actresses, Shabana Azmi, undertook a “fast until death” at the site on their behalf. After five days, she won a promise from the state government that new housing would be found.
A number of locations have been suggested for new housing, but all have been rejected by the sidewalk dwellers as being too far from where they work. Slum dwellers in Bombay differ from slum dwellers in many other places: Most of them have a job of some kind.
Vir Sanghvi, the editor of Bombay Magazine, wrote that before the incident at Sanjay Gandhi Nagar, the Indian middle class was generally apathetic toward the slum dwellers.
Apathy Toward Poor
“Middle-class persons in Bombay regarded the slum dwellers as a nuisance, as filthy subhumans who encroached on other people’s land and defecated on the streets,” Sanghvi wrote. “Each time the municipal corporation sent its demolition squads in and destroyed a slum colony, the typical middle-class reaction was to stand up and cheer.”
The outrage aroused by the demolition of Sanjay Gandhi Nagar was not so much over the destruction of yet another slum as over what the land was cleared for: a modern, spacious apartment building for members of the Maharashtra State Assembly, a place to stay while the Assembly is in session.
This fact reinforced the widespread belief that one of the main reasons politicians seek office in Bombay is to guarantee themselves a place to live.
For years, state and city politicians have neglected to act on proposals to build a bridge that would connect the main business center to the development site 12 miles across the bay on the mainland that was proposed by Correa and approved by former Maharashtra Chief Minister V.P. Naik.
Bridge Plan Stalled
The bridge was first proposed in 1954. Recently, a private corporation, Reliance Textiles of Bombay, offered to build the bridge if the government would permit it to collect a toll.
The proposal is under consideration, but Anil Ambani, a Reliance executive, said the first official reaction was negative. The response, he said, was: “Why should a textile company build a bridge? Why don’t they stick to making saris?”
Bombay’s congestion is as much a result of its dynamism as of its geography. Bombay is India’s business capital, its busiest port and its version of Hollywood. All of this combines to make it the dream destination of millions of Indians and so, in turn, the country’s most perplexing urban problem.
“All over India, the dream of the child is to come to Bombay. The movies are made here,” said Rashmi Mayur, who has a doctorate from New York University and is director of the Bombay Urban Development Institute.
“We have 200 new families coming to Bombay every day with no place to put them,” said lawyer Nani Palkhivala, a former ambassador to the United States. “The city is dying of suffocation.”
Concentration of Wealth
So many people wanting to live in such a limited area has resulted in a concentration of wealth as intense as any in the world. About 20% of India’s manufacturing industries are located here, as well as 25% of its foreign trade. There is no other city in India so vital to the national economy.
“From this small island that is about 6 miles by 12 miles, you get about 45% of India’s direct and indirect tax revenue,” said developer R.A. Maker, a medical doctor whose holdings include many multistory office complexes.
The concentration of wealth has created a kind of economic distortion, according to Mayur, the urban institute director, who says Bombay “is the only city in India where you reach the level of pricing that exists in Hong Kong or Paris.”
In short, Bombay has become a city where very few Indians can afford to live; yet more and more are living there every day. The $5,000 a month that an American diplomat pays in rent is 20 times India’s per capita income of $250 a year.
Rent Control Spares Some
In such a situation, longtime residents, protected by rent control laws, cling to their homes. Their rents are often ridiculously low. Apartments much grander than the ones leased by the U.S. Consulate for thousands of dollars a month may cost their tenants as little as $20 a month.
Landlords, meanwhile, try to drive out the low-rent tenants so that vastly higher rents may be obtained from tenants who do not qualify for rent-control protection. Accordingly, landlords seldom do any maintenance on their buildings. As a consequence, in every monsoon season several apartment buildings collapse on their occupants.
The extent of the greed is legendary. One landlord who recently leased a small apartment to an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for $4,000 a month insisted that no Indians be allowed to live in the building because they qualify for some form of rent control.
“He wanted me to sign a contract that I would never let any Indians, even Indian Americans, live in the apartment,” said the agent, one of a team of U.S. drug agents cooperating in a campaign against heroin traffic here.
The agent said he refused and was reluctantly told that he could have the apartment anyway.
A Constant Struggle
The search for space has become a constant, all-consuming struggle, invading every aspect of existence. Marriages are postponed because couples cannot find an apartment. The city has one of the lowest birth rates in India because there is no room for children.
“To say that Bombay is now bursting at the seams is to be accurate but uninformative,” newspaper columnist Prem Shankar Jha said. “It does not give even a hint of the alarming deterioration that has taken place in the quality of life in the city.”
The search for housing dominates conversation and politics. Housing and what to do about the slums and pavement dwellers are the only true issues in Bombay.
In recent political campaigns, the state branch of the Congress-I Party of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has attempted to placate residents here while sidestepping the issue of what to do about the slums.
The Congress Party leader in Bombay, Murli Deora, a member of Parliament from South Bombay, has promised to sponsor a law that would allow longtime renters here to buy their apartments for a hundred times the monthly rent.
Since many old rents are very low, this would allow many renters to become owners. It would also attack the problem of landlords who neglect their buildings--even sabotage them--in an effort to drive out tenants.
Deora, a former mayor of Bombay and one of the impressive young leaders in Gandhi’s party, has promised the slum dwellers, who account for more than half the city’s votes, that the party will not drive them from their homes.
“We have accepted the slums as part and parcel of the city,” Deora said. “We cannot eradicate them. We must improve them.”
The main beneficiary of the housing issue, however, is one of the dark figures of Indian politics, a 59-year-old former political cartoonist and charismatic leader named Bal Thackeray, whose father took the name of the 19th-Century English writer William Makepeace Thackeray.
An Admirer of Reagan
Bal Thackeray is an admirer of President Reagan and the late Walt Disney--he can wax lyrical about the order and cleanliness of Disneyland. He has led his Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva) political party in a campaign against the slum dwellers and other “outsiders.” He has vowed to remove them, by force if necessary.
On the surface, his movement, one of the few populist political machines in South Asia, is based on the idea that Bombay has been taken away from its original inhabitants, the Maharashtrans. His slogan is “Maharashtra for the Maharashtrans.”
But the movement’s young followers use it more as a vehicle for their outrage at the condition in which they find their city and their lives. In their view, if they are unemployed, it is because one of the pavement dwellers has deprived them of work; if they cannot afford a nice apartment it is because it has been taken by an outsider; the filth on the streets is because of outsiders.
“I want discipline, that’s all,” Thackeray said. “The (pavement dwellers) don’t have any civic pride. They put dirt on the footpaths. They pay no taxes. They pay no rent. They have no responsibilities.”
Thackeray’s critics call him a fascist and a demagogue. But the tide of public opinion seems to be sweeping his way. In the last municipal elections, his party, which he administers with dictatorial powers, won 80 of the 170 seats in the municipal council, compared to only 30 for the Congress-I. An Army of Shiva man is now mayor of Bombay, and Thackeray calls him “my mayor.”
As for being a fascist, Thackeray simply laughed.
Refutes Fascist Label
“People may think I am a chauvinist or a fascist or a provincial man. But what I have done is save the young bloods in this town from turning to communism. I should be thanked,” he said.
Other leaders in Bombay may disagree, but at least one prominent Bombay resident, Palkhivala, the lawyer, agrees on at least one score--that the political climate here is unstable because of the city’s explosive growth.
“I see a time,” Palkhivala said sadly, “when law and order may break down completely.”
