Delhi's pollution crisis is 15 years old. Then why doesn't its real estate market crash out?

Delhi has been dealing with the pollution mayhem for over 15 years. Then why doesn't its real estate market crash out? After all, the momentum in Delhi's realty market is majorly driven by the premium, ultra-premium segment?

What's keeping the rich here?

If you think about it naturally, the elites have the most leverage. They have the resources and pull. If they choose to take a flight and invest in a city which doesn't have extremely hot summers, monsoons that turn roads into stinking lakes, and winters with 1000+ AQI, Delhi's market should, in theory, get punctured. So why don't they?

Is this some form of "long term optimism" around the city amongst the elites? That things will "someday get better"? Because all the problems that the otherwise beautiful Delhi is facing are fundamentally "solvable", and so it's reasonable to expect that they someday will be?

But how "long term" do people look at?

As mentioned above, Delhi's pollution troubles aren't new. The pollution issue cropped up after Punjab & Haryana's Preservation of Subsoil Water Act was passed in 2009. So it's been well over 15 years that this has been on. And forget about improvement, there's not even pretense of anyone in the space wanting to change this.

Did you know that AQI measuring instruments were earlier not designed to go past 500? Thanks to Delhi in winters, they evolved to first go till 999, and then exceeded as the city kept "developing". People may have forgotten, but winters were actually the most beautiful time for Delhi till early 2010s.

So it can't just be the "long term optimism" about Delhi's future.

Years ago, I read a book called "Laws of Scale", which said that once a city crosses a certain density and economic threshold, it stops being a place to live and starts becoming a network to belong to. It becomes an immortal "institution".

That’s Delhi today.

The reason its real estate refuses to crash isn’t optimism, it’s gravity. The city’s economic and political mass is so heavy that it bends rational behavior. You don’t live in Delhi for its weather, roads, water, or even its air. You live in Delhi because it’s still the nerve center of power, proximity, and influence.

A bungalow in Lutyens, or an apartment in Camellias isn’t real estate, it’s a credential. It signals access. It buys adjacency to decision-making. It keeps you inside the echo chamber where India’s money, media, and politics still cross paths.

Cities like Bangalore or Hyderabad may offer better air, but they don’t offer Delhi’s “network value”. They’re markets of opportunity, not authority. And people who’ve built their wealth on power don’t trade it for convenience.

That’s why the rich stay. Because Delhi, with all its smog, still smells like relevance. In startup lingo, "Network Effects" is keeping Delhi alive. Even though the people living in it are having to die to keep the network running.

Laws of Scale. Good book.

It's tough to breathe, but is that the taste of power?

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