cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18156820
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More than 200,000 people in Hong Kong live in sub-divided flats like […], often cloaked in a musty odour and plagued by bedbugs during sweltering summers.
The former British colony [which has been ruled by China since 1997], ranked as the world’s most unaffordable city for a 14th consecutive year by survey company Demographia, has one of the world’s highest rates of inequality.
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Hong Kong aims to eliminate subdivided flats by 2049, a target set in 2021 by China’s top official overseeing the city. Beijing sees the housing woes as a serious social problem that helped fuel mass anti-government protests in 2019.
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Still, Hong Kong’s roughly 110,000 sub-divided flats have become notorious for high rents, with a median floor rate of HK$50 ($6.43) a square foot, a survey by non-government body the Society for Community Organization (SoCO) showed in 2022.
For so-called “coffin” homes, each roughly the size of a single bed, the rate is even higher, at HK$140, exceeding a rate of about HK$35 for private homes.
“All I hope for is to quickly get into public housing,” said Wong Chi-kong, 76, who pays HK$2,900 ($370) for a space smaller than 50 sq ft (5 sq m). His toilet sits right beside his bed and under the shower head.
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About 1.4 million of Hong Kong’s population of about 7.5 million live in poverty, with the number of poor households rising to 619,000 in the first quarter of 2024, to account for about 22.7% of the total, says non-profit organisation Oxfam.
SoCO called for the new regulations to extend to “coffin” homes.
“This kind of bed homes is the shame of Hong Kong,” said its deputy director, Sze Lai-shan.
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“The most important thing is having a roof over my head, not worrying about getting sunburnt or rained on,” said Sum, who gave only his last name.
Chan, 45, who pays rent of HK$2,100 a month for his 2 sq m (22 sq ft) home, said he hoped public housing would finally enable him to escape the bedbugs.
“I applied in 2005,” he said, providing only one name. “I have been waiting [for public housing] for 19 years.”
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The Chinese are pretty heartless about the homeless from my own personal interactions with them on the topic. They call them pitiful and call the police on them if they’re in plain sight. And if you ask a general Beijinger about the homeless in China they’re super blasé about the answer and brush it off on family needing to step up and take care, how the mainland is building affordable housing (and maybe they are idk), or how everyone with limbs should be able to work. The attitude is very conservative against homeless from what I have seen. I liked my tripto Beijing but China isn’t all roses and sunshine.
“The US Government is worse than the Chinese government” -Tiktok Refugees
The US government has serious issues, but not 22 square foot rental issues. Being homeless in California is literally a better quality of life than tens of millions of Chinese citizens experience.
