Mumbai’s skyline is soaring. So is the pressure on housing

The 41-story Altimus tower in Mumbai offers sweeping views of the Arabian Sea. In the wake of a boom in India’s markets, Barclays, BlackRock, KKR, Morgan Stanley and UBS Group have all taken up posts in this glittering glass building in the Worli neighborhood, a former fishing village that’s become a favored residential address for the city’s elite.

Not far away, taxi driver Ramu Virmale is attempting to negotiate a real estate deal of his own. He and his neighbors in a low-income pocket of Worli are hoping to win modest but modern new apartments by allowing a developer to clear away their informally built shanties and replace them with offices or luxury residential towers. It’s a story being repeated across Mumbai, a packed island city where almost a quarter of the 21 million residents live in sprawling slums.

As foreign banks and asset managers scramble to find room to expand, the fate of billions of dollars in real estate deals is tied up with the hopes and ambitions of the cleaners, drivers, laborers and other service industry workers who want to maintain their own toehold in the nation’s buzzing financial capital. “Rich or poor, we should all live with each other,” Virmale says. “We too want clean, good-quality, sea-facing flats. That cannot only be for the rich.”

Demand for Mumbai property is going to rise “exponentially beyond imagination,” predicts Niranjan Hiranandani, the billionaire owner of the property developer Hiranandani Group. But at the same time, he says, “we are talking about 5 million people that will need to be rehoused.”

These days prices for some apartments in Worli are on par with parts of New York, and developers are building in infinity pools, pickleball courts and other amenities to make analysts and traders feel at home. Skilled workers would prefer not to travel far in a city famous for its traffic jams and crowded public trains and buses, and companies want big, new offices that can fit their growing ranks into one location. “If you want to get the best talent, you can’t put them in a shabby office,” says Anshuman Magazine, the chairman and chief executive officer of India, Southeast Asia, Africa and Middle East operations at the global real estate services company CBRE Group Inc.

Office rents in prime locations climbed 23% last year, even as they rose only around 3% in Manhattan, CBRE estimates. Mumbai’s main business hub—the Bandra Kurla Complex, about 8 miles from Worli—is full up, with tenants including Apple Inc., Carlyle Group and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Analysts estimate the city will add 350 skyscrapers in the coming years.

Citigroup Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc and other foreign companies are hunting for hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space, according to people familiar with the matter. (HSBC and Citi declined to comment.) Some businesses face waits of three to five years for new properties. In December, JPMorgan Chase & Co. signed a 20-year lease with Brookfield Asset Management to occupy more than 2 million square feet of office space in the Mumbai suburb of Powai. But America’s largest bank will have to wait until 2030 to move in because it’s still being completed. The office will house 30,000 employees focused on artificial-intelligence-based risk analytics, cyber­security protocols and other high-tech functions. International businesses are also jostling for space with top Indian corporations.

Attracting and retaining big foreign investors is crucial to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan to transform India into a developed market by 2047, the 100th anniversary of independence from British rule. Modi has announced measures to open up his country’s insurance, pension fund and nuclear sectors to foreign investment, creating further incentives for global banks to boost their presence in Mumbai. At a time when the economy is being buffeted by the surge in oil prices caused by the war in the Middle East, the financial industry may be a bulwark. After a historic bull run beginning in 2020, India’s benchmark NSE Nifty 50 index has returned 19% on average for the past six years—in spite of a choppy 2025 and new rout following the outbreak of fighting. Last year set a record for initial public offerings, which raised a total of $22 billion.Chiang Ling Ng, the co-head of real estate investment management at Hines, says the American investment firm has “never been this busy” in India. It’s helping build a property in BKC, as the Bandra Kurla Complex is known locally. And in Powai, alongside Japan’s Sumitomo Corp., it’s developing 300 luxury lake-facing residences. “It is the young population, the English-speaking environment,” Ng says. “All these things contribute to corporations’ interests to have staff in India.”

But even around the shiny towers of BKC, the complexities of Mumbai are on sharp display. For years older residential neighborhoods and a few slums in the financial district have been left by the wayside. Mumbai has laws about rehabilitating slum areas that are meant to ensure developers can’t simply appropriate land.

To meet its obligations for an office project in BKC, Indian developer Prestige Group has built residential apartments for 740 families who lived in the area. The company expects to hand over new apartment keys within a few months. The beige-colored building in BKC, with apartments of roughly 500 square feet, comes with marbled arches, lobbies and amenities including air conditioning. These homes will stand next to Prestige’s commercial complex, which will house pricey office and hotel towers.

The poor neighborhoods targeted for redevelopment are more than collections of tin-roofed shacks. Over the years, some residents have set up local businesses and factories within their boundaries. Others have upgraded to small brick homes. Moving away from them can mean giving up deep social networks. Still, even a small apartment can offer a more hygienic drainage system and a private toilet, plus safety during the floods that lash Mumbai each monsoon season.

A bit more than a mile from BKC is Dharavi, where more than a million people live on only 600 acres. The area is undergoing a massive redevelopment led by billionaire Gautam Adani’s real estate company, with the Maharashtra state government holding a minority stake. The project will build apartments for residents in the area and elsewhere in the city while also constructing public infrastructure, commercial offices and residential towers for sale on the market.

Some residents or community boards have independently sold small plots to other local developers. Apartments that have been built there are going for the equivalent of more than $160,000 on the open market. But not everyone is willing to move out. Shaikh Ashab Ali, 29, a tour guide, lives with his parents and extended ­family—nine ­altogether—in a two-story building on 250 square feet of land. His forebears first moved into the area in the 1800s. As a longtime resident of Dharavi, his father has rights to own land and bought the current home eight years ago for 6 million rupees ($64,000).

The home is now worth at least 9 million rupees. Although the government asked them to move out and promised an equal-size plot not too far away, the family has refused. “We were told a new piece of land will be given to us two years after we move,” Shaikh says. “Where will we stay in the next two years?” Furthermore, it’s not clear whether the family would be able to have a second story, which currently doubles their living space.

Virmale, the taxi driver, is more upbeat about the coming changes. His neighborhood, which houses more than 3,000 families, is a holdout in an area that houses some of Mumbai’s wealthiest residents. He lives with his wife in a 100-square-foot hut. Nearby a $1.5 billion eight-lane expressway skirts the Arabian Sea. “We are in conversation with a developer right now but are yet to sign a contract,” Virmale says. “We want a 500-square-foot flat for all 3,000 families, and they can use the rest of the land to build apartments and offices for the market.”

At current prices, a Worli flat that size could be worth 40 million to 50 million rupees. Even a fraction of that could instantly propel Virmale’s family into the coveted crorepati status—having a net worth of 10 million rupees or more. (A crore is 10 million in the Indian number system.) Virmale doesn’t own the land, which belongs to the Mumbai municipal corporation. But he has rights to an apartment because he’s paid to lease the land for years. Tenants renting shanties from others would have to move out with no compensation.

Upgrading to a new apartment isn’t an impossible dream in Mumbai. Since 1995 the state housing authority has built more than 520,000 apartments, while its slum rehabilitation authority has moved roughly 257,000 families from poor neighborhoods into flats. Developers who build apartments for residents in slum areas get free land to set up office buildings and residential towers, making it lucrative if they’re able to build luxury towers.

Politicians have largely stayed out of the fray, but activists say long-standing ­inequities are worsening. Maharashtra’s slum rehabilitation agency was meant “to create a market subsidy model for housing for poor people,” says Sheela Patel, director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, a nonprofit that’s done surveys in Dharavi. “Now it has been subverted to take hold of land where poor ­people live and dump them elsewhere.”

In Worli, Prestige Group, working with its land partner, DB Realty, has recently razed a collection of huts to level the ground for construction on an apartment building complex for 4,041 families who lived on the land before. The complex will have Waldorf Astoria-branded luxury apartments next door, says Irfan Razack, the billionaire running Prestige Estates Projects, the publicly traded real estate company that’s part of the group. Mumbai is all about coexistence, he says.

Prestige’s quarterly sales now match what it used to make annually five years ago. For its high-end office towers at BKC, the company has secured preleases—a forward contract with tenants for space that will be ready only in 2028, Razack says. “A prelease is a dream deal,” the developer says. It used to be rare for tenants in Mumbai to make deposit payments years in advance. But as India gets wealthier, rich local families and finance executives are purchasing top apartments.

Pushback from residents and activists has the potential to create delays and leave pockets of land undeveloped, but it seems inevitable that Mumbai’s skyline will be permanently altered. “We are going to change the landscape of the city,” Razack says.