Mumbai’s skyline is soaring. So is the pressure on housing.

The morning commute in Mumbai, with the Altimus tower in the background
By Ranjani Raghavan, Advait Palepu and Chanyaporn Chanjaroen
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The 41-story Altimus tower in Mumbai offers sweeping views of the Arabian Sea
In the wake of a boom in India’s markets, Barclays, BlackRock, KKR, Morgan Stanley and UBS Group have all taken up posts in this glittering glass building in the Worli neighborhood, a former fishing village that’s become a favored residential address for the city’s elite.Not far away, taxi driver Ramu Virmale is attempting to negotiate a real estate deal of his own
He and his neighbors in a low-­income pocket of Worli are hoping to win modest but modern new apartments by allowing a developer to clear away their informally built shanties and replace them with offices or luxury residential towers
It’s a story being repeated across Mumbai, a packed island city where almost a quarter of the 21 million residents live in sprawling slums.As foreign banks and asset managers scramble to find room to expand, the fate of billions of dollars in real estate deals is tied up with the hopes and ambitions of the cleaners, drivers, laborers and other service industry workers who want to maintain their own toehold in the nation’s buzzing financial capital
“Rich or poor, we should all live with each other,” Virmale says
“We too want clean, good-quality, sea-facing flats
That cannot only be for the rich.”
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