How Dhaka’s rental housing market marginalises Indigenous tenants

The first lesson for many young people arriving in Dhaka, after leaving the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), is not learnt in a university lecture hall. It is learnt at the landlord’s doorway. There, they learn quickly that a name, an accent, or a face can decide whether a rental house is “available” or “already taken.” For Indigenous people, Dhaka’s rental market is where their identity quietly turns into economic strain and social marginalisation.

Internal migration has long been a driver of Bangladesh’s urbanisation. Rural households move to cities like Dhaka in search of work, education, and services that are scarce in their home regions. For CHT Indigenous communities, the push factors are even sharper: land dispossession, political insecurity, and decades of marginalisation at home combine with the pull of jobs, universities, hospitals, and other urban facilities in the capital. Housing, besides shelter, is the gatekeeper to everything else in city life. Yet, once they arrive, the first and largest cost they face is rent.

Dhaka’s housing shortage and informality are well known. The city grows by hundreds of thousands of new residents each year, but the formal housing supply lags far behind demand. For low‑ and middle-income renters, this means crowded apartments, high advance payments, and heavy dependence on informal arrangements. For CHT Indigenous tenants, this difficult landscape is layered with discrimination, both explicit and subtle, that forces them into the most precarious corners of the market.

Interviews with Indigenous tenants living in areas such as Mirpur, Mohammadpur, and Farmgate reveal a common starting point: finding the first living place depends almost entirely on kinship and co‑ethnic networks. Newcomers typically begin by staying with relatives, friends, or other CHT tenants already embedded in the city. These ties reduce search costs and offer a temporary safety net, but they also concentrate migrants into a limited set of neighbourhoods and buildings. From the beginning, their choices are narrower than those of Bangalee newcomers with broader urban networks.

When CHT tenants step outside these networks and approach landlords directly, their identity becomes a filter. Some recount explicit refusals: being told that “tribal people” are not acceptable tenants, that neighbours will object, or that Indigenous customs do not fit the building. In other cases, the message is delivered more politely but no less clearly: the unit has just been rented, the owner “does not rent to bachelors from outside,” or the advance suddenly becomes impossibly high. Even where no openly racist language is used, the pattern of doors closing at first contact is hard to miss.

Alongside outright rejection, many CHT migrants experience what can be called “slippery discrimination,” which is hard to prove. They are shown only the smallest or darkest rooms in a building, told that higher deposits are necessary “for security,” or nudged towards particular floors and alley-side units that other tenants avoid. Paperwork demands rise too: extra guarantors, employer letters, or scrutiny of identity documents. Each separate request appears reasonable, but together they produce a consistent result: Indigenous renters pay more, accept worse conditions, and enjoy weaker tenure security than comparable Bangalee tenants.

Many tenants describe paying a large share of their modest incomes on rents that still do not buy privacy, safety, or dignity. The promise of urban opportunity sits uneasily with the reality of dark, overheated rooms and leaking roofs.

Economic vulnerability amplifies these disadvantages. Because many CHT migrants work in low-paid jobs, informal employment, or entry-level positions, they have little bargaining power with landlords. Advance deposits and key money can amount to several months of income, locking up savings that might otherwise support education, healthcare, or small investments. When incomes fluctuate or emergencies arise, rent becomes a constant source of anxiety. Households often cut back on food, medicine, or children’s schooling to avoid defaulting and being forced to move suddenly.

Frequent moves are, in fact, a defining feature of many CHT tenants’ urban lives. Unwritten agreements, rising rents, conflicts over utility bills, or tensions with neighbours can quickly end a tenancy. Without formal contracts, tenants have little recourse when asked to leave. Every move means new advance payments, new school commutes, and yet another attempt to convince a landlord that they are “trustworthy people.” The cycle of search, negotiation, and resettlement consumes time, energy, and money, hampering the process of building stable lives in the city.

These housing realities have deep social consequences. Physical distance and long commutes limit participation in campus life, community activities, or civil society organisations. Language barriers and memories of discrimination make some hesitant to interact with neighbours beyond co‑ethnic circles. Women, in particular, face layered constraints: they must navigate both conservative attitudes towards female tenants and ethnic stereotyping. Curfews, visitor restrictions, and heightened surveillance inside buildings can make even “safer” accommodations feel like another form of control.

However, CHT migrants also display remarkable resilience and creativity in coping with these constraints. Many rely on dense social networks, relatives, and student associations to circulate information about available rooms, negotiate better terms, and provide emergency loans for deposits. Online platforms and messaging groups have become informal housing markets where Indigenous tenants warn each other about exploitative landlords and recommend more welcoming ones. Shared apartments, rotating savings groups, and collective bargaining by groups of tenants are all strategies that soften, even if they cannot fully remove, the sharp edges of Dhaka’s rental market.

Seeing these experiences only as a “housing problem” is a mistake. Housing is the key mechanism that transforms being Indigenous and being a migrant into a daily experience of economic insecurity and social distance. When a CHT Indigenous student must spend hours commuting from a distant, overcrowded building, or when a young Indigenous worker is repeatedly turned away from better‑located apartments, the effects ripple into education outcomes, job opportunities, mental health, and civic participation. Who lives where, and on what terms, shapes who feels they belong in the city at all.

Policy responses must therefore go beyond building more units or adjusting rent controls. At a minimum, Dhaka needs clearer rules around advance payments and deposits, standard written agreements that are simple enough for ordinary tenants to understand, and mechanisms for addressing discrimination in rental advertisements and first contact. Most importantly, landlords, policymakers, and urban professionals must recognise that rental housing is not an ethnically neutral market driven only by price and location. It is a social institution where prejudice, fear, and ignorance can quietly assign whole communities to the city’s margins.

Arnab Chakma is a graduate in public administration from the University of Dhaka.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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