India’s urban housing issues are complex and cities face significant challenges. This includes limited capacity to build new affordable housing by the public sector, resultant housing shortages, and a high vacancy rate of empty houses due to limited and expensive housing stock. 

Housing shortages can be attributed to restrictive land use regulations that limit the Floor Space Index (FSI), and limits on residential building height. It’s well recognised that these arcane measures that were originally created to restrict population densities are regressive and need urgent reform. It is also important to note that access to affordable housing leads to improved job opportunities.

Read the full report here.

The project methodology focused on interviewing key experts from the real estate sector, think-tanks, and government, as well as conducting an in-depth analysis of housing data and other relevant data sets to highlight the challenges faced in the urban housing sector. These challenges range from the difficulties faced by the real estate sector in accessing formal credit for acquiring land, to extremely high transaction costs. Rigid tenancy laws create an artificial supply constraint. The lack of land use-transport integration results in an increase in usage of private vehicles, and decrease in public transit mode share.

The methodology also refers to key indicators including the growth rate of property investments (Residex- a residential property price index) across cities, and comparing it to other investment opportunities such as gold, Fixed Deposit, and the Sensex S&P 30. Additional factors that have been compared include  residential building height restrictions in Indian cities vs global cities, and maximum free FSI permissible for Indian cities vs global cities

The report was launched by Shri. Hardeep Singh Puri, then – Union Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs (Independent Charge) at the IDFC Institute Political Economy Dialogues in June 2018. Key impacts that the report helped generate over the years are shared below. 

• The recommendations from the report were published in the 2017-18 Economic Survey of India
• We were invited to teach a course on affordable housing at LBSNAA to senior civil servants, and over the years we have been invited to present our recommendations on improving housing affordability to senior government officials
• We shared housing policy recommendations for three Union Budgets
• Based on the recommendations, NITI Aayog conducted a survey to create an inventory of public lands to free up land for housing and other uses. 

As a member of the Urban Reforms Working Group, Government of Punjab, in partnership with the World Economic Forum, we have provided bespoke training on property tax reform, urban expansion, and sustainable mobility. We have also been invited to be a member of  MoHUA’s Working Group on Data Smart Cities, the National Urban Learning Platform and other committees.