Let our dreams of brick and stone and mortar, cement and steel come true. By building housing colonies and townships, we can raise our standards of living... thus there will truly be a richer fuller life for all of us, and for the coming generations. These are the closing lines of the Films Division documentary (Search for Shelter, 1950) which focused on the Bombay government's efforts to build new townships on a cooperative basis. The black-n-white nine-minute English film, made three years after Independence, advocated rapid construction projects as a cure-all for urban housing in Mumbai where the displaced homeless converged for jobs.

In 2019, 72 years after Independence, a 27-year-old architect-researcher Apoorva Sharma points at the political incorrectness of the film's worldview, in her study titled Stories of Suburban Mumbai's Co-operative Housing Societies, done under the aegis of Mumbai's School of Environment and Architecture (SEA). Sharma, who taught a module on Repair And Retrofit (based on embedded retrofit practices in five Mumbai building types) at SEA, finds the 'richer-fuller-life' theory funny at two levels: first, despite the 60,000 societies in Greater Mumbai and around (Thane, Palghar and Navi Mumbai) a large sprawling population is in slums or homeless; second, a feverish congestion of residential co-operatives is not necessarily perceived as an eco-friendly option for a crowded metropolis. Sharma has dealt with a range of housing models in her examination of emerging
cities like Vishakhapatnam and Vijayawada. As a Fellow of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore, she zeroed in on "Houselessness in Shivajinagar."