Are young people still welcome?

For those trying to rent a home, jumping through hoops and fighting prejudice are still unfortunately part of the struggle

I once lived in a building that called for an emergency meeting one weekend, to decide if a group of four young men could continue renting an apartment on the premises. Their crime was watching too much television, apparently, which they did right through the day, presumably because one or the other would always be home. It wasn’t the first time our building’s secretary reacted the way he did. These meetings were common, called after one or several residents would complain about some male or female tenant supposedly disturbing the peace. Eventually, a few years after I had moved, I found out that a series of rules had been put in place to dissuade all owners from renting out their homes. This couldn’t have happened without consensus on who could or couldn’t stay in that building. It saddened me.

And yet, the weirdest thing about this tame anecdote is how uneventful it now seems, because of how we have normalised the setting up of mini fiefdoms in our societies and townships. This behaviour would be considered strange in most countries, because I haven’t come across such dictatorial tendencies anywhere else, but we take it all for granted because of how common it is.

It isn’t a Bombay thing either, because horror stories about renting across all of India’s metros can be found daily by anyone who cares to look. Are you the right gender? Do you eat the right food? Are you social? Do you have more friends than you need? These are only the minor issues that newcomers to any city must grapple with, because there’s no point mentioning those elephants in every room: religion and caste. Worse, these questions come to the fore only after a potential renter has made peace with the fact that year-on-year rent increases can be as high as 30 per cent.

I acknowledge that talk of capitalism, free markets, or greed is pointless, given that landlords have behaved in this manner since the day one of them realized they could charge someone a fee for space to live in. Having said that, the casual cruelty with which diktats are issued and enforced upon people who have no choice but to comply, says a lot about the brutality of our society. Everything about the rental process is heartless and almost inhumane, and the only reason we accept it without question is because of how indifferent we have become to discrimination, and how systemic it now is after centuries of exploitation.

Cities tend to thrive when they are welcoming, because people come with ideas as well as the need to hustle. It’s what made Bombay a magnet, attracting aspiring entrepreneurs, workers, entertainers, and industrialists from across the country. That welcome mat is now frayed, and our collective apathy towards newcomers—predominantly youth in search of better opportunities—risks changing the way our city evolves.

If this sounds like the making of mountains out of molehills, it was prompted by a friend’s ordeal a few months ago. A single woman from a small town, she was invited to join a large organisation and assumed it would be easy to find accommodation given the validity of her senior position. What followed can only be deemed harassment, as brokers, landlords, and even watchmen—who openly discriminate between owners and renters at every building, in case you hadn’t noticed yet—laid down a series of ridiculous obstacles before her. One wanted to meet her father, another wanted her to promise not to invite male guests over, while a third refused to meet until she gave him her surname. That these men could get away with this racist and misogynist behaviour only shows how toothless the laws against discrimination are. It also laid bare the hypocrisy of Bombay being considered safe for women.

There is a yawning gap between what needs to be done to fix problems related to housing, and the little that is being done because everyone’s attention is on reclaiming land for taller buildings.

We tend to gloss over these glaring examples of inequality because we are jaded, or possibly think of ourselves as too insignificant to spark change. We fail to accept the possibility that our lives can change overnight, and that the homes we take for granted may be taken from us. Would we want to be treated the way young tenants in our buildings usually are? I hope that honest answers to that question may compel some of us to do something about it.

When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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