Tag: apartments

Apartments and mixed zoning

So, as Udupa put it, I went to Barcelona “on a study trip like a corporator”, came back and wrote one piece on urban planning in Barcelona and what India can learn about it. The piece is in Pragati. An excerpt:

That said, there are important lessons to be learnt for India from E’ixample. Most current models for urban development take after the sprawl-heavy automobile-intensive US model. What is important to make the new “smart cities” effective is to move away from this model to a more dense public transport focussed “European model”. And from this perspective, the new cities could do worse than looking to Barcelona’s E’ixample for inspiration.

Read the whole thing. Anyway, so I talk about two features of E’ixample (the district in Barcelona where the wife lives, and hence where I spent most time during my trip last October) in the Pragati piece, and mention that they’re useful concepts that India should adapt for its “smart cities” program – mixed zoning and apartments.

The former, I argue, ensures that there are “eyes on the street” at different points in time. This helps keep the crime rate low (deserted streets and lack of pedestrian movement usually make it more conducive for criminals), and provides a safe atmosphere. The latter ensures good efficient land use and allows for provision for large roads and open spaces without compromising on total density. And as I realised this evening, the two concepts (apartments and mixed zoning) are not independent.

One of the reasons that people offer for strict zoning (keeping residential and business areas disjoint) is that they don’t want random people hanging out in front of their residences. Random people hanging out in front of your house makes you feel unsafe, and a bit weird, and if there is a shop or a restaurant next door, the chances of this happening are rather high. For example, recently the Bangalore Mirror wrote about a “controversy” regarding the opening of a cafe in a residential area in Koramangala. Neighbours don’t like such cafes as it will lead to people hanging out in front of their homes, and that gives a sense of violation of space.

So what makes apartments and mixed zoning go together? When you live “high up” in a mid or high-rise building which you share with many other people, your sense of ownership of the space in front of your house is lower. If someone is “loitering” in front of your house, you are less concerned because 1. you are farther away from the “action” and 2. you don’t feel a sense of violation of your space. Thus, being in an apartment makes it more palatable for you that there are shops and restaurants and offices close to your house.

Now, everyone likes shops and restaurants close to home, but in case of single-unit homes, people are likely to adopt a “NIMFY” (not in my front yard) attitude towards these – for they might violate your space. Apartments help address this conflict!

Hence apartments and mixed zoning go hand in hand, and both need to be encouraged. Note, however, that I’m not proposing Brigade Gateway as the ideal model for urban development!

Floor Space Index

In an extract  from his latest book Triumph of the City Ed Glaeser argues that one way to improve urban living would be to increase the floor space index, and allow higher buildings. In another recent article, Ajay Shah argues that the presence of army land in the middle of cities is again hampering urban growth and development by increasing intra-city distances and reducing space for the common man inside the cities. I was thinking about these two concepts from the point of view of Bangalore.

Floor space index (FSI) is a metric that controls the total supply of residential area within a city. It is defined as the ratio of built-up area of the house to the area of the plot it stands on. Currently, in Bangalore it is capped at 1.5. This means that if I own a site measuring 60′ by 40′, the maximum area of the building I can build on it is 3600 sq ft. Clearly, by capping FSI, the total supply of residential area in a city is capped (assuming cities don’t expand outwards, of course). Currently, a lot of the development going on is of the type of builders acquiring “underutilized property” (old bungalows, say) and then “unlocking the value” by building buildings on it up to the permissible limit.

So I was wondering what were to happen if the government were to tomorrow decide to act on Glaeser’s recommendations and suddenly increase the FSI. For one, it would jack up the value of land – since there is more value in each piece of land that can now be “unlocked”. On the other hand, it would lead to a gradual fall in prices of apartments – since the limit on the supply of “floor space” would go up, that would lead to a fall in prices.

Existing owners of “independent houses” (where they own both the house and the land it’s built on) would be overjoyed – for now the value of the land they own would suddenly go up. Existing owners of apartments wouldn’t – their net worth takes a sudden drop. But all this doesn’t matter since both these groups are highly fragmented and are unlikely to matter politically.

What one needs to consider is how builders and real-estate developers would react to this kind of a move, since they have the ability to influence politics. For one, it would allow them to build additional floors in properties where they already own the land, so they have reason to stay positive. On the other hand, due to the increase in land prices, new development would become much more expensive than it is today, thus making it tough for them to expand. Another thing to note is that increased supply of housing and office space in the city would definitely negatively impact the prices of such holdings on the outskirts, and I’m of the opinion that a large number of real estate companies might actually be “long” housing space on the outskirts and would thus lose out in case the FSI were to be increased.

There are other implications of increasing FSI, of course. One of my biggest nightmares is that density in cities will increase at such a high rate that the sewerages won’t be able to handle the extra “flow”. And then there is the issue of increased traffic – though it can be argued that increased density means that commutes might actually come down. Overall, to my mind at this point of time, the picture is unclear, though given the overall incentives to the powerful real estate community it is unlikely to happen. Though I would definitely welcome any increase in FSI (this has nothing to do with my financial situation; and yes, based on my current holdings I’m “long FSI”).

As for army land, there are vast areas that used to once be on the outskirts which are now inside the city. If the army were to decide to sell them to the city, I’m sure it would be able to make a really large amount of money. But then given that the army is not a profit-oriented institution, it has no need for the money so will not let go of the land. In fact, as I write this, the army in Bangalore has taken up the development of lands around the inner ring road – some townships and football fields have come up. But then, this is not the use that Shah envisaged – for none of this actually integrates enough into the local economy to make an impact. And so for the army to sell the land, the decision would have to come from the central government. And given that increase in in-city floor space is likely to negatively impact the powerful real estate companies, don’t be surprised if they were to lobby against the sale of urban army land.

Tailpiece : A while back there was this issue of Transferable Development Rights. When the BBMP wanted to widen roads it announced that people losing land would be compensated in the form of tradable TDRs. For that to be effective, a necessary condition is that the cost of violating the building code is actually high.

Immigrants

One thing I have noticed in Bangalore – and I’m not sure if it is true in other cities in India but I have a feeling that it is – is that immigrants inhabit parts of the city which natives wouldn’t really want to live in. I’m making this observation based primarily on one data point – Ejipura.

Till a couple of years back, the only reason I’d heard of this erstwhile slum is because houses there would get flooded every time it rained. Apart from that, it was a fairly nondescript part of Bangalore “somewhere close to the 201 route”, and generally considered an area to be avoided.

And now, slums have been replaced by swanky looking apartments and office buildings, where IT companies and people who work in them have set up tent. What was earlier an unlivable part of the city has suddenly become livable. The roads remain the same though. I don’t know if the houses still get flooded. There are open drains all around. And I have no clue how localities such as this get their water and sewerage supply.

Oh and there is massive dressing up of addresses. It is not Ejipura, it is Koramangala 6th block. Similarly, it is not Byrasandra, it is Jayanagar 1st Block East. And so forth.

I think what has happened is that when the city grew in the first fifty years of independence, farmland in the villages around the pete and cantonment areas was acquired and layouts were planned. The villages themselves were left alone by the BCC/BDA. And people who migrated to the city back then (let’s say at least 20 years back) applied for and got sites in one of these planned localities where they constructed their houses. And so I grew up in this house built on a BDA-allotted site, but up the road from my house was the old Kathriguppe village.

Now, what is happening is that these villages are selling out, to private parties. Knowing the value of the land all around the village (basically in the BDA areas) , people in these villagers have suddenly realized the value of the land that they are sitting on, and are selling to private builders, who either build apartments (most of the cases) or “revenue layouts” (rare). And given that these erstwhile villages haven’t traditionally been considered livable by people living in the city for a long time, they usually end up being occupied by recent immigrants.