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Comment by drieddust | Hacker News Reader

This is due to appeasement and corruption of previous Government. Government passed a Law which allowed constructing 4 floor building in every area of Delhi. This simply killed the city as you cannot increase the population density by a factor of 4 in a already crowded city.

Secondly they grabbed all the land around NCR(National Capital Region) which resulted in prices of properties reaching simply affordable levels. This only increased the pressure on the core part of Delhi.

It is an example of evil Governance.

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> you cannot increase the population density by a factor of 4 in a already crowded city

New Delhi isn't even in the forty most densely-populated cities [1]. The city feels crowded because infrastructure has not developed with the population. If you want to see what happens when a government artificially cap housing supply, visit San Francisco.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...

Though I agree with your point, New Delhi and Delhi are not the same. New Delhi is a less dense area within Delhi that has many parks, government buildings, monuments and large suburban houses. There are areas of Delhi that are very dense. With any urban comparison, where you draw the border lines is essential and often difficult to do consistently.

An interesting thing to notice from your link, Union City, Guttenburg, and West New York (all in New Jersey) make the list while New York City does not. This is only because of how the lines are drawn.

I don't disagree completely, Infrastructure development prior to passing such law would have have helped.

There is a lot of land around Delhi to develop the city laterally instead of allowing 4 floor construction on a 50 square meter plots on a narrow street. How to you allow for electricity, water, and commute without creating bottlenecks. Road are already conjested and new ones cannot be constructed easily. You can go underground and that's happening (Delhi Metro Project) but it's neither easy nor cheap to build an underground transportation system under a crowded city. It all comes down to appeasement and corruption going hand in hand.

SFO might be on the other side of the spectrum with its draconian zoning laws though.

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