While I was drafting the second part of the piece on apartments vs. independent houses, I happened to go through the archives of Aavaas, partly to see if there had been any relevant posts about this topic in the past. Well, what do you know, I found two separate posts made by Vivek and Karthik. Both were made last year, so please excuse me for missing them in my first post. Check out what Karthik has to say here and you can read Vivek’s views on the topic here.

So to summarise where we were yesterday, apartments are becoming popular in Indian cities despite the fact that they are not considered the best option in other parts of the world. One major reason for the increasing popularity of apartments is the difficulty of land transactions in India and its associated maintenance later on. Not to speak of the problems in constructing a brand new building in the middle of a major city.

One other aspect which is unique to India, is our extremely poor infrastrucure in terms of roads, power, water, parks, public transportation etc. In other countries where the infrastructure is relatively good, they have everything to gain by living in an independent house; but in India, our poor public infra forces those who can afford it, to live in islands of affluence - represented in today’s townships & apartment complexes.

I have just one problem with townships.  Most of them are too far away from the city. So while they solve all infra problems that are internal, they actually exacerbate the transportation issue!! And about those ads that say townships will have schools within their premises, all I can say is, they don’t have a clue what it takes to build an school. Maybe I’ll write a whole separate post on this side issue later on

All things considered, from a pure live-ability standpoint in the larger Indian cities, apartments score over independent houses for ordinary people (especially non-natives). Please read Vivek & Karthik’s posts also for more on the subject. They talk a lot more about issues like privacy &  security which are critical.

However, from an ownership perspective the ranking is reverse; an independent house being a better asset than an apartment. Will adress that in a later post.