Renting vs. Buying – A case study for Bangalore

Do you want your children to grow up amidst traffic, potholes, pollution and stray dogs?

Maybe the well-earning FAANG SDEs on here might pretend to escape the reality of Indian metropolis by renting or buying an apartment in a "gated society".

Yet you have to go outside the "gated community" and routinely exposed to the realities of metropolitan India, which exacerbates everything wrong with the country by packing a million of them in one PIN code. This is only going to get worse in the coming years.

There's no solution apart from developing the "tier-2" cities and villages.

Every mediocre "SDE" leetcodemaxxing to work for the same 15-20 top paying companies HQ'd in Eastern Bangalore is not going to end well.

The biggest problem with this and I say this being someone who is adamant about renting and not paying 3C for a house in Bangalore is that people around you will constantly be emotional. No one will be convinced by numbers if they've made up their mind to buy a house. People still think buying a house is an investment or they think it's security. They don't realize it'sore anxiety inducing to pay a loan. I gave up trying to convince anyone else and just keep my suggestion to myself now. I'm only going to buy a house in a tier 2 city one day. Or a village. I don't want to live in Bangalore if I can get the privilege to move out.

Conversations on this topic could be interesting, but this "article" is literally just a word-to-word copy-pasted default-styled AI response to a single prompt.

Considering an LLM wrote this, I wonder when will LLMs go from writing insightful (sounding) investment advice to basically agentic landlording?

I know the article is AI slop just by the structure, my last job at MSFT had me producing artefacts like this, which is why I quit ;)

The issue with buying land outside major metro areas like BLR are the following,

1. Irregular power supply. I lived 2 hours outside of BLR in a village and the power would regularly go off for minimum of 3 hours, sometimes more. The current KA government made a promise to voters to supply subsidised power and the downstream effect of this is that they must mandatorily supply power to BLR which is the only economic engine of KA. Consequently they end up shafting everyone else.

2. Poor education quality. The best teachers and smartest students are concentrated in BLR, unless you are willing to homeschool or are fine with your child not getting the best, this is a difficult tradeoff to live with.

3. Narrow minded people in villages. Unless you live in touristy areas like Coorg, CKM etc you will not find the diversity that you find in a big city like BLR.

4. Less than ideal medical care. Most villages don’t have the sort of hospitals and doctors you would find in BLR. The best doctors who would be the best paid won’t come to villages. Although I did live near a teaching hospital and the medical care there was average. If you’re a healthy individual, you might ignore this.

Surprisingly the roads were decent, a result of being near a highway and having very low population density.

Apart from these, I was living a “slow life”, had great AQI (most days), wide open spaces, great and cheap food. If you’re fine with the shortcomings, buying land in and around major cities is affordable but the shortcomings I mentioned are real and I don’t see them going away anytime soon.

As to the efforts to decongest BLR, there are quite a few like Bidadi township but they are are more like bringing BLR style haphazard development to the outskirts, but these things are still very much in the nascent stage now.

> This is not a cyclical recession — it's a structural shift.

AI slop

> Rising hyper-nationalism eroding liberal democracy and economic openness

Same BS for the last 10 or so years?