The Four Seasons vs the Bureaucrats of Mumbai
Joe Leahy writes:
FT.com / Asia-Pacific / India - Riches rise from Mumbai slum clearance: [T]his week, after years of navigating red tape, the 202-room Four Seasons Mumbai became the first luxury hotel of its size to launch in the city’s south in about 20 years.... “In hindsight, the choice of this location seems quite straightforward but at that time this wasn’t an obvious site for a hotel,” Adarsh Jatia, a director of the family company, Magus Estates and Hotels, says. Guests arriving at night at the Canadian chain’s first hotel in India will see slum-dwellers sleeping on one side of the road and on the other the glittering glass tower of Mumbai’s newest symbol of luxury.
In India’s financial capital, engine of the country’s rapid economic growth, such scenes are increasingly common as high-end developments sprout up among the sprawling huts.... The idea is to move slum-dwellers into apartment blocks occupying a corner of the area over which they sprawl and redevelop the remainder.... The Four Seasons slum-dwellers living on the site were compensated.... “You’re seeing Rolls-Royces on one side, luxury hotels on the other and slums in between – that’s why they call Mumbai the Maximum City,” Jason Stinson, marketing director at the hotel, says....
Archaic restrictions that have prohibited the construction of high-rise buildings and sky-high land prices have contributed to the shortage, Vincent Lottefier, chief executive of Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj, says. Bureaucracy and a shortage of skilled workers make building hotels difficult – the opening of the Four Seasons was delayed by at least two years. The hotel needed 165 government permits – including a special licence for the vegetable weighing scale in the kitchen and one for each of the bathroom scales put in guest rooms. In the end, the hotel cost $100m (€64.5m, £51m), or about $500,000 per room, and prices – which start at $500 per night rising to more than $1,000 – reflect that.
But there is little social envy [expressed to Financial Times reporters]. Vishal Doshi, whose shop sells samosas in the slum, says the hotel brings prestige. “Everyone can now say: ‘I’m living near the Four Seasons’,” he says. He is under no illusions that he will be a guest there any time soon. “This side of the road is for servants, that side for bosses,” he says.
