ChrisD(RJ) wrote:
> How much are rental prices in India, in, say, the suburbs (assuming India
> has suburbs in the US sense of the term)?
There aren't suburbs in the US sense of the term ! If you have in mind middle class housing, then there are apartments, small in size. Usually purchased with loans from housing finance companies. There is a boom in Housing finance business here. General trend is towards buying small apartments in Metro towns. (Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai and Chennai are metros with the total pop. of 50-60 million.) In smaller towns, the middle class prefers independent houses. Workers typically live in rented tenements/slums. These can be on the rental basis.
CD: Practically everybody who lives in the urban areas in Russia lives in an apartment, including the middle class (often in the same building with working-class people or lumpens with much lower incomes, with more-or-less identical apartments). Buying an apartment would be wildly expensive for most people, in the 10s of thousands of dollars, unless you sell your apartment and use the money to buy another one, or exchange an apartment. A country house, on the other hand, is buyable. Building a full-fledged house in the Western European or US sense near a city can only be done by the upper class. The primr real estate in Moscow is in the city center -- things decline the further out you get.
Ulhas:
Is this a heritage of Khruschev era, urban households growing vegeables in the backyard? Russia has land in plenty, but how much is cultivable?
Russians have higher per capita income than Indians. They can afford $200 per sq. metre. An urban Indian is happy if he can afford 6 x 6 apartment to live in Metro towns !
Russia began to import large quantities of corn in the Brezhnev era to feed the livestock. Have they stopped all that?
Me:
It's not people in cities growing produce in their backyards (they don't have yards, they live in apartment blocks). They own summer cottages with land plots made available to them in the late 70s by the Soviet government, which they grow vegetables on.
I would guess that about 30% of the territory is arable. One-third is permafrost and another third under Siberian taiga (subartic forests).
Russia imports large quantities of corn (and food, good stuff from Ukraine and crap from the West), but I think less than during the USSR.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal