Adoption of a Demand-Centric Approach to Understand Housing Issues in Mumbai

A key challenge confronting Mumbai city is the provision of affordable housing. Several steps have been taken to tackle the different issues related to availability and affordability of housing in Mumbai, but all these issues have been looked at largely, if not entirely, from the supply side. Solutions like rehabilitation of slum dwellers, public housing schemes and so forth, showvery limited understanding of consumer behaviour regarding housing. This study is an attempt to understand housing in Mumbai from a demand side perspective. This is done by the use of methodology of the stated choice. A popular technique for estimating the stated choice preference model is conjoint analysis. In this paper, we useconjoint analysis to understand key housing preference drivers for various socio-economicclasses in Mumbai. Our study area is the suburban parts of the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation. The key findings of this study are that people across socio-economic strata show strong willingness to remain not only within the Corporation limits but also within their suburb. Lower socio-economic classes are highly sensitive regarding the ease of access to markets, whereas the size of the house is perceived to be a luxury. The lowest socio-economic class has a strong desire to move out of slums to "pucca houses", i.e., residences relatively more solid and durable. Accessibility to basic services appears to be the major driving force in the choice of housing location for the urban poor. Also, we infer that there is a need to integrate transportation in housing policy and vice versa.