TWO recent, seemingly disparate incidents throw sharp light on Pakistan’s relationship with residential real estate. The first was the purported legal (and political) troubles of Bahria Town, which culminated in a message from its founder stating that insolvency and operational breakdown in its residential schemes were fast approaching.

The second incident occurred during the recent flooding of the eastern rivers in Punjab. When water levels rose downstream from Jassar and Shahdara, a large number of residential streets in Park View City, a housing project built almost on the Ravi riverbed in south-western Lahore, were inundated and had to be evacuated.

The cause for both incidents is considerably different — palace intrigue and political machinations in the first, and nature colliding with human hubris and greed in the second. Yet they elicited similar types of discussion. In both incidents, the fate of residents was a subject of much hand-wringing and concern.

The key debate is on the extent of middle-class complicity in encouraging destructive patterns of real estate development in Pakistan. In both examples, some people consider insolvency and operational breakdown, or devastation at the hands of nature, as poetic justice.

The key debate is on the extent of middle-class complicity in encouraging destructive patterns of real estate development in Pakistan.

It is well documented, including through excellent reportage by this newspaper and a Supreme Court judgement, that land acquisition in Karachi and elsewhere has involved a variety of unsavoury tactics and interventions. This is true not just of the developer in question, but many others who operate at scale. Coercion, intimidation, familial and community pressure, ecological destruction, as well as the brute power of the state, are all deployed in acquiring land and building private housing schemes.

Given this backdrop, one view is that people who opt to reside in similar housing schemes are ultimately beneficiaries of the illegal and unsavoury behaviour of developers. That the coercion and violence deployed is eventually in service of their housing dreams and aspirations. That many choose to ignore how these housing dreams are actually delivered, and as in the case across the country, are directly in conflict with nature and delicate ecological conditions. So if their dream suddenly collapses (due to politics or flooding in many other examples), this is simply karma at play.

The opposing view to this is that the residents of such schemes are usually not the elite. These are aspiring upper-middle-income households between the fifth and the 15th percentile of the income distribution. They can’t afford the better-functioning neighbourhoods closer to the city centre in the metropolitan areas of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. The neighbourhoods and towns they grew up in are plagued with service inefficiencies and insecurities of various forms. Given a chance to find a relatively cheaper option, they opt for it without much thought to how that option came into being, ie, whether it was built on land coerced from a villager, or developed by flattening a hillside, or by claiming land from a watercourse.

Depending on how charitable one feels, it’s easy to side with either of these two positions. People should be mindful of what they’re buying and the ethics of its production. Ignorance is hard to use as an excuse in a country with 24/7 news saturation. Even superficial use of one’s eyes and common sense would be enough to show that a scheme built literally on the riverbed might face a flood in the future.

But from a more charitable view, while the aspiring home owner is one beneficiary (and thus has to shoulder some of the blame), they are the smallest fish in this contaminated pond. There are a series of bigger fish who have turned land into the socially and ecologically destructive force that it is today.

These include the savers who hold on to empty plots for years in the expectation of selling them for a profit but by doing so reduce the available supply of land for those who may actually want to live on it. It includes the investors who buy and sell multiple files and plots in quick succession, thus raising prices rapidly and locking out those in genuine need for housing. It includes the developers and their financiers who cut every corner imaginable to minimise their cost of development, including finding land that nature has deemed off-limits.

But most of all, it includes the state, without whose active participation and complicity none of this would be possible — whether it is through the military’s appetite to reward its own officers via land, or the corruption or incompetence of local officials in development authorities like RUDA and LDA, or through the complicity and rent-seeking behaviour of politicians who are investors in land schemes or who protect the interests of their friends, families and financiers in real estate.

If one is looking to apportion blame, the bulk of it falls on the state. It has been the state’s decision to become a willing partner in the illegality and ecocide that have brought us to a point where minor climatic changes wreak major destruction.

Some counter this by saying that state officials at the local level buckle under pressure from above, and that reform-minded politicians are helpless against the military, or that big developers get their way with every government.

However, these rationalisations are ultimately useless. People should not expect fairness or ethical behaviour from developers, who are occupationally tied to the pursuit of profit. They should also not look towards the military to change its behaviour, because there is no direct relationship of accountability there. What they should expect is their elected representatives to show some concern and consideration for the common interest. And right now, that interest is clear — socially and ecologically destructive uses of land, whether legally planned or illegally active, need to be stopped.

The writer teaches politics and sociology at Lums.

X: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2025