Reason #1: The Housing is Ridiculously Overpriced

I’m not comparing Bangalore to Mumbai or Shanghai or New York here. I’m comparing Bangalore to Bangalore.

Single family homes are rentable in multiples of 1 lakh a month unless you live out in the middle of nowhere, have lousy road access, arrange to pump your own borewell water and generate your own electric power. A 3-bedroom apartment in a compound with recreational facilities should cost you a third to half of that.

The rent bubble has burst, and one can now rent a small villa in Palm Meadows, an upscale gated community, for Rs. 40,000 a month, instead of a lakh a year ago. Homeowners whose rent expectations zoomed from Rs. 20,000 to 2-3 lakhs are now cooling their heels as there is an oversupply of housing.

Gated communities at least offer on-site recreational facilities that compensate for the utter lack of cleanliness or facilities outside their walls. But a dekko will bring the shocking realization that many of the so-called luxury housing options available are little better than low income housing projects in the United States or Europe.

Typically, what you pay for is just a roof over your head because the city does not have much to offer in terms of civic amenities or quality of life.

That homeowners and agents demand extortionate rates isn’t any tribute to the superior quality of the housing on offer or the attractiveness of Bangalore as a city. For rents that are higher than in Palo Alto, Calif., where the original Silicon Valley is, Bangalore offers dug up footpaths, unswept streets, open drains, and daily chaos, making it a destination for people who have to be here because their jobs are located here. Not only does the housing exclude any white goods, it does not include good (and free!) schools, rolling parks and ribbon-smooth highways. It does include horrendous traffic jams and a high probability that your principal source of water will be tanker trucks bringing pesticide-laced ground water from the city’s dwindling borewells to your building. All in all, a laughable price tag for the only good thing on offer: the weather.

Bangalore’s topsy-turvy housing prices are all about supply and demand. There was a huge demand for high-end housing from 2004 for NRIs and expats moving to Bangalore. Whitefield became an attractive location because villas with on-site club facilities were available within a 30 to 45 minute drive to two popular international schools (TISB and Indus), and close to ITPL and its vicinity, where the offices of IT majors are located, as well as to the old HAL airport.

With the housing bust already here, thousands of apartments built to lure property speculators now lie vacant in Whitefield. Villas are quietly put on sale. Gone is the bidding frenzy of prospective renters and the queues of buyers willing to shell out several crores for villas they built for Rs. 20 to 40 lakhs.

The rental market has cooled too. Landlords who salivated at the prospect of luring a gullible expatriate to pay them 2-5 lakh a month in Palm Meadows, with a 15-month, interest-free deposit now have villas lying vacant for months. Gone are the days when they coldly evicted tenants in the middle of leases because some agent promised a company lease that would pay them double.

The new airport is in the city’s north, as are some of the newer international schools. Although still very much an expat ghetto, Palm Meadows is no longer the only option for new expatriate families. More housing is available in every neighborhood of Bangalore. And traffic jams have doubled the peak hour commute from Whitefield to M.G. Road from 45 minutes four years ago to an hour and a half on a good day. Electronics City to the airport is a good 2 hours. A windfall doesn’t last forever.

Apartment prices are also a third to half of what they used to be a few years ago. But these are a bargain only if you think your dream home should come with: No zoning regulations, so you can have a shop or restaurant open practically anywhere in a residential area. Traffic noise that lasts into the wee hours of the morning. Walking on streets that have choked gutters, no sidewalks and no safe junctions to cross at.

The gloriously spreading trees along the sides of roads that the Garden City got its name from are quickly being cut down, and there is rubble and trash everywhere. Metal barricades and knee-high medians stretch for kilometers, with no consideration for pedestrians and school children. Motorcycle riders think footpaths are an extra lane for them to drive on. Streets get flooded after a few centimetres of rain. People fall into overflowing drains and drown every monsoon and yet nothing changes.

All these make Bangalore an ugly, decaying and unsafe city.