City 'ants' face eviction from colonies
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Xiao Ling (left) fixes her capsule apartment in a residential area near the East Fourth Ring Road in Beijing's Chaoyang district on Jan 8. She said she is afraid she will leave her home soon because of the new regulations. |
Finding cubicles is not hard in any city. A simple Internet search produces a list of apartments with spaces to rent for less than 1,000 yuan a month.
Wang, who arrived in Beijing in 2006 after graduating Tianjin University of Science and Technology, has lived in three different units, with prices ranging from 600 to 850 yuan. He said that, like most landlords, his is a sub-lessor who runs several converted apartments.
"(The landlord) is making money," he added. "He doesn't care about being caught."
Huang Rixin, one of the pioneers of capsule homes in Beijing, said low-cost housing was vital for graduates and white-collar workers who flock to cities.
"Young people need a place to stay before they can realize their big-city dreams, while cities definitely cannot keep developing without the migrant population," said the 79-year-old engineer, who recently donated his capsule apartments to the capital's Shijingshan district government.
Living in a box
Under the rules issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development in December, houses and apartments must be rented based on their original designs, while the use of kitchens, bathrooms and balcony areas as bedrooms is banned. Offenders will face fines from 5,000 to 30,000 yuan.
"The regulation replaces an earlier version in the 1990s. The old one no longer fits the fast developing housing rental market in China," said Li Chang'an, a public policy professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE). "However, the new one looks too advanced."
For a start, the number of low-cost public rental apartments is already insufficient to meet the demand. "Beijing alone had only about 20,000 apartments in 2010, while there were millions of potential renters looking for places," he added.
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