If you have spent enough time travelling around Dhaka or almost any growing city in Bangladesh then you have probably seen a building with exposed red bricks, steel rods sticking noticeably out of the roof like it is waiting for another floor that may never arrive, windows without glass, a staircase leading somewhere but apparently nowhere.
Some of these buildings have looked exactly the same for years so why does Bangladesh seem to have so many buildings that are permanently stuck in the awkward stage between being under construction and maybe one day? The biggest reason is unsurprisingly money.
Building a house in Bangladesh is incredibly expensive and construction costs do not stay still. The price of cement, rods, bricks and labour can suddenly rise. Many families begin construction with whatever savings they have, hoping to finish the rest later but ‘later’ can turn into five years or ten.
Instead of taking massive loans people often build slowly. One floor gets completed and occupied while another remains unfinished. When more money arrives, construction starts again. In Bangladesh, a house is sometimes less of a finished project and more of a lifelong subscription. Then there is the famous mentality, ‘we'll build another floor later.’
That explains the steel rods poking out of so many rooftops. Families often leave columns exposed because they hope to eventually add another storey when the family grows, a child gets married or enough money magically appears. Land inheritance also makes things complicated. A property may belong to several siblings or relatives where all of whom have different ideas and different amounts of money. One person wants to finish construction immediately and another cannot afford it, someone else lives abroad and stops responding to family WhatsApp messages so the building remains unfinished.
Bangladesh's rapid urban growth has also created a strange situation where owning property matters more than finishing it beautifully. Land and buildings are valuable investments. Sometimes people would rather secure a structure on their property first and complete the details gradually than wait until they have enough money for everything.
There are also more serious reasons. Construction projects can stop because of legal disputes, problems with permits, disagreements between developers and landowners or changes in government regulations. In some cases, developers run out of money after collecting payments from buyers, leaving families stuck with half built dreams. Also let's be honest sometimes the building is technically finished enough. The family has moved in, there is electricity, there is water, someone is cooking downstairs but the outside still looks like the workers just went on a tea break in 2014.
Perhaps that is what makes Bangladesh's unfinished buildings so interesting. They are not always abandoned. Many are actually living, breathing homes, growing alongside the families inside them. Those exposed bricks and lonely steel rods are often signs of something very Bangladeshi ambition postponed but not abandoned. The building may look unfinished but in its owner's mind the next floor is definitely coming soon.
