Even the dead must make way as construction transforms Afghanistan's capital

This is less a pure infrastructure story than a repricing of urban land rights under fiscal stress. When a municipality leans on expropriation-funded road widening, the first-order output is cleaner traffic flow; the second-order effect is a forced liquidation of informal/owner-occupied real estate into a market with weak title certainty and limited alternative buyers. That tends to compress local property values near project corridors while lifting rents in adjacent neighborhoods that become the new “best connected” zones.

The labor effect is also asymmetric. Road works create near-term wage income, but it is temporary and geographically concentrated; the bigger medium-term beneficiary is any business model tied to mobility, logistics, cement, aggregates, and diesel consumption rather than residential construction. If projects are funded from municipal cash rather than external financing, the constraint is not capital availability but execution capacity and political tolerance for compensation disputes, which raises the odds of stop-start construction and cost overruns over the next 6-18 months.

The contrarian point is that modernization can be deflationary for land rents even while it is inflationary for replacement costs. Investors often assume road upgrades are broadly bullish for real estate, but in fragmented markets with weak legal protection, the winners are the owners of clean-title land outside the demolition zone, not the incumbents inside it. The main macro risk is backlash: if compensation lags or widens inequality, expropriation becomes a political tax on informal wealth and could slow future projects or shift them toward less disruptive corridors.