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By Root 1699 0

of children, and spent it on renovations to the dingy old apartment. A wall was ripped out, new kitchen counters installed, floor tiles replaced with marble, impressive new ceiling mouldings and lights installed by her carpenter cousin. The couple talked about the comfort and self-respect these improvements would bring them—and domestic self-respect is not a value to be neglected among slum-dwellers—but they also talked about the equity value. These improvements would raise the resale price of the apartment they had just bought for $42,500.

It is an elegant home. It is also barely theirs. Their family income had crossed the middle-class threshold three years earlier, when Manohar had landed a job driving executives’ cars for a company that makes electronic instruments. He had come to Mumbai from his village in central Maharashtra at age 14, making the transition from pavement to slum using his network of fellow villagers. Subhashini was the child of a veteran arrival-city family, a gregarious woman of singular self-confidence, and she made it a well-organized project, from her marriage at 18, to get her family out of the slum.

His annual salary of $6,600 was not going to be enough to do it. The Parabs encountered two problems that are endemic across the world of arrival cities: an illiberal property market rigidly reined in by zoning and rent-control regulations and ownership restrictions, and an underdeveloped credit market that makes proper mortgage loans available only to the very highest-income groups. One set of restrictions discouraged anyone from building or selling homes affordable to the lower middle class (or to almost anyone, as millions of Mumbai home buyers have discovered); the other made it impossible for the Parabs to get a home loan of any sort, even with a sizable down payment. Or as Dinanath Berde, the estate agent who sold them the house, told me: “There are a great many poor people in this city who want a three-room house, but all too often either they are not available because nobody is able to build them, or their household budget is not matching the supply. There just are not entry-level homes here.”

So it would take the Parabs three more years to turn their savings and income into a home, during which Subhashini spent months visiting bankers and estate agents, researching government regulations, and finding work. In the end they did it by taking advantage of another, very different side of Mumbai’s property market. The Parabs, like many arrival-city residents around the world, had bought their slum shacks as they moved up from the lowest level of housing. They had held on to both their previous properties and had used both their earliest 110-square-foot shack and their more recent 200-square-foot chawl as sources of rental income. They get $35 a month for the first home and $70 for the second; combined with Subhashini’s earnings working part-time at a costume-jewelery workshop, this was enough to boost their income to just under $8,000 a year—the point at which a loan became feasible. They discovered, as people trying to enter the middle class all over the world are discovering today, that the line cannot be crossed on one income alone: it is necessary to become a two-income, and sometimes a three-income, family. This has given considerable economic and social power to women in many otherwise traditional communities; it has also, in turn, made child-care services a desperately important commodity in the arrival city.

Even with all those income sources, it was not a simple matter of buying a house. The Parabs were not eligible for any kind of actual mortgage. India’s banks are extremely conservative in their lending practices, a fact that saved the country’s economy from ruin in the credit-crunch crisis of 2008 but that also has frozen millions of people out of the housing market. Instead, as millions of other families in the developing world do, they took out a consumer-purchase loan, ostensibly for buying appliances and at a far higher interest rate than most mortgages. Even that was not quite