DRIVE along what was once considered to be the fringe of any major urban centre in Pakistan and behold our collective sin: housing societies. All of us are complicit. Anyone with cash to spare ultimately reaches the same conclusion: investing in real estate is the best way to turn a profit. The business environment in this country has been so volatile and unwelcoming for so long, that it is indisputably easier to tie your money up in a plot and forget about it.

Land is a closed-ended investment and is not reproducible — which is what makes it safe. But it also means this kind of investment does not generate anything productive beyond the construction of housing societies. It takes the country’s wealth and parks it in plots, hoping that speculation will benefit them sooner rather than later.

The mania that has gripped Pakistan as a result means every inch of land is a premium commodity to be exploited. Nowhere else in the world do files and plots seem to dominate the national imagination as here. We live in a city, a province, a nation of real and aspirational property tycoons. No patch of earth is safe and everything is for sale. Prices in cities like Islamabad are artificially inflated and maintained there — even at a short- to medium-term loss.

There’s a bevy of developers surrounded by obsequious real estate dealers and hawk-eyed investors. They sell dreams of plotting and cutting with your money — promising dancing fountains, highways to speed down with nowhere to go, and other offensively unimaginative uses of land.

No patch of earth is safe and everything is for sale.

To satiate the insatiable needs of the Pakistani upper class, the state has not only allowed them to plunder the common good, but has joined at the forefront. Communities have been displaced on the outskirts of every city — the unwilling among them coaxed with peanuts, tied up in legality, strong-armed by ‘authorities’. Villages, fields, orchards, eaten up by societies and traded back and forth as plots in a self-aggrandising cycle of price appreciation.

Those who already have land, of course, are far likelier to acquire more of it. It is classic oligarchical rent-seeking. Across state institutions and party lines, everyone is complicit in selling off our cities for profit. There are simply too many vested interests in property and its associated markets, simply too much capital tied into it, for us to disengage from this model.

For all that this is, there are two things it is not. First — if it wasn’t already clear — the purpose of this level of commodification is not public service. It is not intended to cater to our very real housing shortage of approximately 12 million units. Instead of a boom in affordable housing, hence, we see plots of detached single-family units.

Second, one might think it acceptable to sell off a public good if it adds to the state exchequer and can, presumably, be used to provide essential services. One would be wrong. As Atif Mian and others have reminded us over the years, Pakistan has one of the lowest rates of revenue generation from property: around one per cent of total taxes, and only 0.1pc of total GDP.

So what does this mean? It means a tiny elite, bolstered by the middle class, profit off a public good, as millions remain without a roof over their heads, and state institutions get rich while, somehow, the government remains poor.

The inevitable problem with land is that there’s only so much of it. Swathes of peri-urban agricultural tracts have already been eaten up. The highways will have to become infinitely broader, the vehicles driving along them endlessly multiplying, the smoke emanating from them choking the skies. Cars and concrete will continue to raise temperatures, as the water supply oscillates between flood and drought. If not the economics, the ecology will catch up with us soon enough.

While cities across the world move towards literally bringing people closer, we sprawl farther with each passing year. What is required is a fundamental shift in our relationship with land — away from a private sector speculative market towards a public good. This is why governments exist; this is why local governments exist. Their core purpose is effective regulation and equitable redistribution — ensuring that resources serve the common good and essentials are available to those who would otherwise go without them.

With due respect to the overused Native American saying, it is perhaps the most pertinent to describe our national addiction to property development: “Only when the last tree has been cut, the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, will we realise we can’t eat money.”

The writer is a sustainable urban development specialist.

Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2025