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Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
- smartwater 13y agoUp to 60 floors / 20,000 people in an apartment building? I didn't realize that existed. I don't think you'd find an apartment building in the US that has even a fraction of that. The largest hotel in New York is the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. It has 49 floors / 1,949 rooms, which I don't think comes close to 20,000 people; I couldn't find the exact occupancy.
- jmduke 13y agoThe Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town in New York has eleven thousand tenants, which is at least a fraction.
- devy 13y agoBut that's the ENTIRE residential development block - NOT a single building as denoted in the original post. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Stuyvesant_Town_and_Peter_Cooper_Village_crop.jpg/1116px-Stuyvesant_Town_and_Peter_Cooper_Village_crop.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Stu...
- nerfhammer 13y agoAccording to cousin comments this stat is per development block
- nostromo 13y agoI found a mention online that the average household size in Hong Kong is 3 people (in 2006). So that's 20,000 people over 60 floors, 3 per apartment. That's 100 apartments on a floor! They must be incredibly compact if those numbers are correct.
- meric 13y agoIt's actually usually a set of half a dozen same shaped buildings. See the first image in the article.
- ddeck 13y agoThe 20k figure would be referring to the development, which would be several "blocks" (i.e. independent buildings crammed next to each other). The average household size is still 3 (bit lower in public housing) with average living space per person of ~140 square feet. Keep in mind that those 140 square feet are measured based on the outside of the building!
- evertonfuller 13y agoHuh? The W Times Square has 55 floors.
- VLM 13y agoUS Naval academy, the entire 4000 person university lives in one gigantic dorm building. That's the largest dorm I can think of, at least in the USA. I've never seen it personally, but I've heard its spectacular and seen some interesting pictures of the luxurious common areas. If you permit skywalks to make one large building, technically most of downtown Minneapolis and (I think?) Toronto would be one big building. If you define "a building" as you can walk from one place to another indoors. I don't think interaction scales as well as some think, I lived in a 13 floor roughly 600 person dorm at university and as I think back I never set foot on perhaps a third of the floors, and spent the vast majority of my time on just two floors. So making it 100 floors tall would primarily mean I'd almost never visit about 90 of the floors rather than almost never visiting about 10 of them. This also happens horizontally, not just vertically. I live in a 580 square mile county. I spend the vast majority of my time, probably over 99%, in about 4 of those 580 square miles. That's just kind of how life is, lots of sleeping, gathering and consuming food, working, raising/educating kids... I believe my county nears the size of the state of Rhode Island, however I don't think social interaction is much different merely because the lines on a map are closer together. I have lived rural, suburban, and urban, and my limited observation is ignoring each other is a defense mechanism. So in rural areas we were all practically blood brothers simply by virtue of being neighbors, but in urban apartments I would not even know my neighbors names. Suburban is somewhere in between.
- jmduke 13y agoI used to -- and still do, to some effect -- fetishize living in a highrise. I was a suburban kid who grew up in a boring (and, in retrospect, wonderful) house surrounded by other boring houses -- I watched Seinfeld and Frasier, and loved the idea of living in an apartment complex, where prospective friends and plotlines were only yards and floors away. Looking at Michael's pictures, I'm struck with a particular sense of envy -- I realize, knowing what I know about median Hong Kong quality of living, that its likely unpleasant to live in these conditions. And yet, the sheer mathematics of it -- twenty thousand tenants divided by sixty floors is around three hundred per floor -- makes me smile at so many imaginary hallway interactions.
- spacehunt 13y agoGrass is always greener on the other side. Living in Hong Kong right now I do miss living in a detached house in suburban Melbourne. A lot. And no, we rarely see anyone else in the hallway, and even when we do we don't say hi to each other.
- meric 13y agoYou can always start. My grand mother who lives there talks to everyone on the elevator.
- olalonde 13y agoOr use Wechat's "look around" feature. I don't recall if it is widely used in Hong Kong but in China I have met a few neighbors this way.
- vacri 13y agoTravelling in the US, this Australian found that Americans are far more likely to start a conversation with a total stranger, apropos of nothing. It's so rare here, but pretty commonplace there. So... just try saying 'hello' - it may just be cultural reticence on your part.
- prawn 13y agoWhenever I pass someone in a quiet street and there's often that awkward moment, I think about the thousands of years we've evolved in smaller tribes and communities. And how poorly we are prepared as animals for purposeless encounters with others.
- lisper 13y ago> After years of living in a small house in Hong Kong’s countryside... Hong Kong has countryside?!?
- spacehunt 13y agoLots of it.
- jsankey 13y agoThe Hong Kong we tend to think of is the very densely populated Hong Kong Island and Kowloon area across the bay. Actually there is a huge area beyond Kowloon to the north known as the New Territories which is much less developed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Territories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Territories
- eru 13y agoHiking is fun there.
- olalonde 13y agoYes and some nice beaches too.
- briandon 13y agoThe countryside consists of the hilliest bits, which the government and developers pretend that they can't build on (Don't look here or there at the hilltops with towering apartment blocks perched on them, it'll spoil your suspension of disbelief) and the flat spots which the government hasn't yet chosen to build a "new town" (i.e. insta-city) on and which tend to be non-trivial to reach since mass transit hasn't been extended that far since the government hasn't yet chosen to build a "new town" there since... What's happened is that a small number of wealthy families have basically completely captured HK and "real estate" accounts for a huge chunk of the local economy. HK residents and, increasingly, PRC citizens seeking a way to smuggle ill-gotten money out of the PRC proper park their money in the form of tiny cement apartments which they have no particular need to rent out to anyone since there's a prolonged property tax holiday in effect. The value of tiny cement apartments only stays high so long as there's the appearance of scarcity of tiny cement apartments. This requires the apparent scarcity of land.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoAlso, let's face it. It's very difficult to reason about the interior of a building from pictures of its exterior. Who knows how nice these apartments are? I grant that many of them are not probably up to the standards Americans are used to, but the mildew from the tropical climate and various other factors conspire to make things look worse than they are, I bet.
- spacehunt 13y agoAnd most of them have a choice of multiple ISPs offering 1Gbps FTTH for about US$20-40 a month...
- cmsmith 13y agoOf course they do. The cost to run fiber to a building is largely independent of the number of units in the building. So it makes perfect sense that higher housing density leads to lower costs and higher speeds.
- EliRivers 13y agoBased on my experience living in a small town in England five minutes walk away from rolling, open fields, I suggest that what leads to lower costs and higher speeds is actual competition between broadband suppliers, rather than regulatory capture and cartels. I understand that it's common in the US for high-density housing areas to have very little choice, poor service, and to pay a fortune for their internet.
- cmsmith 13y agoOK. As long as we're giving anecdotes, I live in high-density housing in the US, and pay $50 for 200 Mbps symmetric service. Service which is only available in buildings above a certain size.
- ddeck 13y agoYes. But keep in mind that minimum wages is $3.75/hour with no paid breaks. Also, that's your connection speed to the ISP's network. As soon as your traffic leaves HK, you're more likely looking at < 10 Mbps
- paxswill 13y agoI watched Dredd on Netflix a few days ago, and I'm struck by how similar these apartments and the blocks in the movie look.
- jacquesm 13y ago"In Hong Kong, Rich Live In Mountain Mansions And Poor Live In Cages" http://www.businessinsider.com/hong-kong-rich-live-in-mansions-and-poor-live-in-cages-2013-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/hong-kong-rich-live-in-mansio... I think it wouldn't be too far out to guess that the eventual end of planet earth is to be covered with structures like in the article posted and people living in it along the lines of the one linked here. How many people could you cram in like that? Hope you like to eat fish.
- frozenport 13y agoFirst, Don't take such a dim view! There is no reason why the buildings can't be twice as high and twice as roomy. Secondly, We be living off soylent
- briandon 13y agoAre (many of) the apartments privately owned in this scenario? If so, then everyone who has already bought an apartment and everyone who stands to inherit such an apartment will "lose" money or the opportunity to convert their real estate into money in the future if newer apartments are more spacious or nicer in any obvious way. Real estate developers will have less difficulty selling the units that they build right now if buyers are confident that future apartments will not be nicer (and hence more desirable to future buyers) than the apartments that you're trying to fob off on them today. It's a feedback mechanism that, unchecked, leads to what you find in HK: progressively slightly smaller, more unpleasant apartments being built with every passing year.
- doctorstupid 13y agoThere is a fortunate side effect to living in such tiny spaces. Having spent a couple of years living in what could be considered submariner sized dwellings, I found that the only thing I used the spaces for was sleeping. When one lives in a tiny, depressing hole, one tends to maximise the time spent out in the world doing things and socializing. With all of that activity I lost weight too. There is a tendency to beautify and manicure our dwellings as if they were tombs in which to be eternally housed, sometimes with the result us of not wanting to leave them.
- briandon 13y agoWhen you were living in a cozy apartment, did it happen to be in a city where free, public conveniences (like greenery, shaded benches, water fountains, etc.) were rare to nonexistent, situated in a region where the climate was extremely hot and humid year-round? I ask because I live in such a city and socializing seems to take the form (for the affluent) of, for example, sweaty people buying overpriced iced coffees so that they have an excuse to sit in an air conditioned cafe and (for the less well-off) of people, especially the elderly, sitting on ledges, steps, the rare bench or two, etc. in air conditioned shopping malls, libraries, and government buildings all day.
- doctorstupid 13y agoNo, it wasn't in such cities. They were, however, equipped with excellent public transportation, which certainly lowers the barriers to going out.
- hoi 13y agoOne of the reasons for such high housing costs is the influx of investment money. For example, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beverly_Hills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beverly_Hills apartment complex is mostly empty. Most of the houses bought up by rich mainlanders looking to park their money somewhere that would still grow their investment. Secondly, there are cheaper alternatives. Living in teh New Territories can be tremendously more cash efficient. I live in the hills in a house, 2 floors, 3 bedroom, with a garden, and pay less than $2500 USD per month.
- briandon 13y agoTotally correct. Now, if you told HN the net floor area of your $USD 2.5k-a-month village house and the dimensions of your 3 bedrooms, you'd probably shock many posters here.
- ddeck 13y agoCorrect. What few realize though is that the archaic pegged exchange rate is the key contributor to this. In a typical exchange regime, such an influx of capital would push the exchange rate higher and provide a balancing effect. Instead, you get asset price inflation while wages in local currency remain flat. This makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. [1] Compounding the effect is the inability to have any kind of independent monetary policy since the rate is pegged and there are no currency controls. Consider an economy with strong growth, 6% inflation, and interest rates on home mortgages of .....~1%? Welcome to HK. [1] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-06-18/hong-kong-s-wealth-gap-widens-amid-aging-population-inflation http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-06-18/hong-kong-s-weal...
- 3rd3 13y ago(Google Street View) https://maps.google.de/maps?ll=22.335737,114.14855&spn=0.002858,0.008444&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=22.335773,114.148685&panoid=odCVp6Lk8NXqDop5iFDjFw&cbp=12,174.11,,0,-48.77 https://maps.google.de/maps?ll=22.335737,114.14855&spn=0.002...
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- deerpig 13y agoHaving lived in several buildings identical to the ones in a couple of the photos for nearly a decade I can assure you there is nothing very nice about living in them. The lifts and the hallways have no air conditioning. The flats themselves are really really really small, you can fit a queen size bed into the larger bedroom, but you're left with enough room to ease into the room sideways. The worst is during Jan to early March when you get 6-8 weeks of cold weather. It's only down around 10C but the buildings aren't insulated and everything is made of tile, so the wind slices through the walls and the tiles suck the heat out of your body. A lot of these housing blocks are built on top of enormous shopping malls, or train stations or both. And getting to and from work every day means pushing your way through what my Chinese wife used to call "a sea of people" which people in the West would only see if you went into a city for fourth of july, or new years eve fireworks.... And the pace of life there makes NYC feel like a backwater village. There truly is no place like Hong Kong on the planet. That said, my time in Hong Kong was perhaps the happiest of my entire life. And you get used to living on top of everyone else. I'm headed there next month, which is only a 1.5 hour flight from Phnom Penh. I can't wait. There is a little noodle shop in Dai Wai that I've been dreaming about for two months now....
- dualogy 13y agoI'm headed back to Phnom Penh after 3 months of Euro summer. Haven't bumped into many coding types back when I was there (Jan-May) but then I've been staring too much into my own codez all the while.. wanna hang for hacker coffee after 4th September, then just get in touch!
- ksec 13y agoPrice for Flat and Rental by income average are highest of anywhere on earth. And NO, New Territories aren't cheap either. Heck even flat in Out Skirt Island are expensive. Business Monopoly by a few companies. Not necessarily a bad thing since South Korea are the same too. Except Samsung manage to feed to poor and give back to the country. Even with so much evil going on with them they still have some decency to their own country. And yet these companies in Hong Kong are much more about extracting all they can from Hong Kongers while not making contribution. Government has zero direction on where to go, no leadership what so ever. No idea where the problems are. And unwilling to solve it.