Thread by @AnilKSood5

#Housing and Physical Living Conditions
@khilwani_karan @andymukherjee70 @kikumbhar @Sabya_K @sritara
We have converted a large part of Urban India into terrible living spaces that don't even provide adequate breathing space- forget privacy.

1. Our policy, combined with the real-estate and construction industry practices has made housing completely out of reach for a vast majority of people in the urban areas,...

2. ...unless a family is willing to commit itself to lifetime of housing-driven indebtedness, but with no guarantee that they would not live a slum-like conditions in future.

3. The industry sells the price rise narrative and says that no one has lost money in housing without telling us that the price rise is not universal and is determined by many different variables. If one gets the timing wrong, it not easy to recover the opportunity cost of money.

4. Since a large no. of households don’t understand finance & end up believing the high-decibel propaganda-like hard-sell or marketing campaigns, we have a situation where some of the cities in the country have years of unsold inventory and empty houses waiting to be rented out.

5. We r then told that the interest rates must be dropped for industry to lower the cost, allowing the middle-class households to buy homes. A recent industry report mentioned that NCR has 2.67 unsold houses, which can take 6 years to sell. (2016 when the eco had not slowed down)

6. The situation in other cities is no different. We know that the average project delay has been between two to three years for a very long time.
Post pandemic, we know that the states are cutting duties to help industry sell its stock.

7. Yet another implication of increasing real-estate price is the cost of doing business – the cost of running a retail store, cost of office space, cost of a warehouse, cost of parking, cost of setting up a school or a hospital and so on.

8. In other words, we have real estate driven inflation which is far more permanent than any other form of inflation.

9. We can not have artificially propped up real estate prices, if we want a decent quality of life for our people and low cost of doing business.

10. Economic and social cost of distorted real estate and financial prices is not small. Not to mention the scams that have been unearthed globally in India - GFC and post GFC.

11. I would use moral suasion to help industry leaders understand what is good for them.