Chinese are a hard working people. But faced with skyrocketing housing prices, Chinese also have to think hard how to live cheap, such as refugee-like group rentals (群租) in Shanghai. Translated from Guangzhou Daily:
In Shanghai, the average new-apartment price has gone up from 8,818 yuan per square meter in August 2006 to 10,280 yuan this August. For a new college graduate like Zhang Qiang who came over to Shanghai for work from the Northeast, his 1,300 yuan/month internship salary doesn’t allow him to live in a nice spacious apartment.
Zhang does the math for the reporter: for a 80-square-meter apartment at a residential compound, called ‰∏≠Ëøú‰∏§ÊπæÂüé, it costs 4,000 yuan a month to rent, way too much for a newcomer to Shanghai. But it’s much more affordable to get a tiny space, say a 3-square-meter box, in a “renovated” apartment for 700 yuan/month. And with that kind of living, he still saves no money during his one-year internship period. Meals will cost him 350 yuan a month, transit 6 a day.
He doesn’t like crammed apartment sharing: with a middle-aged woman running her marriage brokering business in his neighboring “box” day in and day out, bothering his sleep. In those “renovated” apartments, more than a dozen people share a unit boxed up with plywood. Normally a home for a small family, now residents will have to cram themselves into tiny boxes, some of which eat up the kitchen. And tenants will need to cope with the noise of other people, For instance, Zhang needs to get up at four o’clock to get in line for toilet and teeth brushing before going to work.
Now Shanghai is cracking down on the cram renting, as the poorly renovated apartments have had some major accidents in recent months, such as a gas poisoning last December and a short circuit triggered fire that killed six in July. Now people like Zhang will have a hard time finding new places to live. For now, he found a room at a youth hostel in the city. [Full Text in Chinese]
[Image: Shanghai launching the biggest crackdown on cram-rentals in a residential neighborhood, via China Foto Press]
