The residents of Sanjaynagar chose where the building would go, where their own apartments would sit inside it, who their neighbors would be, and worked with architects on the layout of the units themselves. Eight housing cooperative societies were formed to represent different groups within the settlement [1].
That is the part that makes this worth writing down. The people who lived in the shacks held the pen on what replaced them, and they were not moved somewhere else to make room for it [1].
Sanjaynagar sits in Ahmednagar, in Maharashtra. Roughly 900 people lived there across 206 metal shacks, many of them a single room. The project has run in phases since 2017, and the first families moved into new apartments in 2022 [1].
The completed building holds 33 units across three stories and houses 31 families from the original neighborhood. Units run about 300 square feet, arranged around a shared courtyard, with corridors built wide enough to carry light and air. The residents named it Swapnapurti, which is Marathi for a dream fulfilled [1].
Here is the money, because the money is the mechanism.
A household pays about $1,000 for its unit, roughly 10 percent of construction cost, borrowed at low interest through Rang De, a peer-to-peer lending platform. India's federal housing scheme, PMAY, contributes $2,500 per unit. Philanthropy covers the remainder, with donors including the Currystone Foundation [1]. If $1,000 is about a tenth of construction, construction runs somewhere near $10,000 a unit, though the account does not state that total and we are not reporting it as a figure of record.
The architecture partner is a nonprofit, the Community Design Agency. The local nonprofit Snehalaya and the local government are the other partners [1].
The residents were asked what changed. Pooja Gawali: "I relish the privacy I have now. It's a joy to be able to live freely." Pooja Suryavanshi, on her son: "I dream of the day he will grow up in a home with sturdy walls that keep out the wind and rain" [1].
The reported downstream effects are school performance improving, better access to jobs, families spending their own money on home improvements, and enough community trust to keep the later phases moving [1]. Those are reported, not measured. No study is cited and no figures are attached, which is worth holding in mind before this gets described as proven.
The arithmetic is the limit here. Thirty-one families are housed. The settlement had 206 households. Fewer than one in six of the original families are in the finished building, and the account gives no completion date for the phases that would cover the rest.
The project took a Silver award at the World Habitat Awards in 2026, per NPR's reporting. We were not able to confirm that result from the awarding body itself, so it stands on NPR's attribution rather than ours [1].
What is settled is smaller than the award and more useful than it. Two hundred and six households were living in metal. Thirty-one of them are now in a building whose location, floor plan and neighbor list they chose, at a household cost of about $1,000, and the model held up well enough that the neighbors still waiting are still willing to wait.
