Events

The Centre for Policy Research invites you to a talk on:

Relaxing Floor Area Ratio: Housing Supply & Affordability in India

Tuesday, 21 April 2026, 3:00 PM IST

Speaker: 
Dr. Sahil Gandhi, Assistant Professor, University of Manchester

Discussant:
Arkaja Singh, Fellow, CPR

This event will be held in a hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room and online via Zoom. Please register below to attend.

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About the Talk
Does relaxing zoning regulations increase affordable housing or simply trigger the building of new, larger units?

This talk explores a relaxation of the regulatory cap on building height and floorspace, the Floor Area Ratio (FAR), to answer this question in Mumbai, India. Leveraging granular panel data and exploiting variation in time and space, we find that developers increased their FAR utilisation by 17%. The reform increased the supply of housing units in treated areas by 58%. Overall, the FAR relaxation resulted in no change in unit sizes. However, areas receiving a higher intensity of FAR relaxation witnessed a significant decline in unit sizes, resulting in a larger increase in the supply of housing units. The increase in supply leads to a 24% decrease in house prices, which allows lower-income households to access housing. The talk ultimately shows how FAR relaxation improves housing affordability.

About the Speaker
Sahil Gandhi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Manchester and has previously held positions at the Urban Policy and Governance programme at TISS and at the Brookings Institution India.

He is an urban economist whose research focuses on land and real estate market frictions that affect housing market outcomes in Indian cities. Gandhi’s research received the 2025 Edwin S. Mills Best Paper Award, a leading urban economics award given by the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

His research is published in the Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Geography, among other leading peer-reviewed journals. His work has been featured in the Washington Post, The Hindu, The Indian Express, and Livemint, and cited by the Financial Times, The Economist, and BBC.

His current research examines adaptation to urban flooding, public housing outcomes and how relaxing Floor Area Ratio regulations shaped housing supply and affordability in Mumbai.