Hong Kong's poor live in stacked metal cages

77-year-old Yeung Ying Biu sits inside his 16 square feet cage, which he calls home, in Hong Kong on Jan. 25, 2013. / AP

HONG KONG For many of the richest people in Hong Kong, one of Asia's wealthiest cities, home is a mansion with an expansive view from the heights of Victoria Peak. For some of the poorest, like Leung Cho-yin, home is a metal cage.

The 67-year-old former butcher pays 1,300 Hong Kong dollars ($167) a month for one of about a dozen wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment in a gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood.

The cages, stacked on top of each other, measure 16 square feet. To keep bedbugs away, Leung and his roommates put thin pads, bamboo mats, even old linoleum on their cages' wooden planks instead of mattresses.

"I've been bitten so much I'm used to it," said Leung, rolling up the sleeve of his oversized blue fleece jacket to reveal a red mark on his hand. "There's nothing you can do about it. I've got to live here. I've got to survive," he said as he let out a phlegmy cough.

Some 100,000 people in the former British colony live in what's known as inadequate housing, according to the Society for Community Organization, a social welfare group. The category also includes apartments subdivided into tiny cubicles or filled with coffin-sized wood and metal sleeping compartments as well as rooftop shacks. They're a grim counterpoint to the southern Chinese city's renowned material affluence.

Forced by skyrocketing housing prices to live in cramped, dirty and unsafe conditions, their plight also highlights one of the biggest headaches facing Hong Kong's unpopular Beijing-backed leader: growing public rage over the city's housing crisis.

Leung Chun-ying took office as Hong Kong's chief executive in July pledging to provide more affordable housing in a bid to cool the anger. Home prices rose 23 percent in the first 10 months of 2012 and have doubled since bottoming out in 2008 during the global financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund said in a report last month. Rents have followed a similar trajectory.

77-year-old Yeung Ying Biu sits partially inside the cage, measuring 1.5 square meters 16 square feet, which he calls home, in Hong Kong on Jan. 25, 2013.

/ AP

The soaring costs are putting decent homes out of reach of a large portion of the population while stoking resentment of the government, which controls all land for development, and a coterie of wealthy property developers. Housing costs have been fuelled by easy credit thanks to ultralow interest rates that policymakers can't raise because the currency is pegged to the dollar. Money flooding in from mainland Chinese and foreign investors looking for higher returns has exacerbated the rise.

In his inaugural policy speech in January, the chief executive said the inability of the middle class to buy homes posed a threat to social stability and promised to make it a priority to tackle the housing shortage.

"Many families have to move into smaller or older flats, or even factory buildings," he said. "Cramped living space in cage homes, cubicle apartments and sub-divided flats has become the reluctant choice for tens of thousands of Hong Kong people," he said, as he unveiled plans to boost supply of public housing in the medium term from its current level of 15,000 apartments a year.

His comments mark a distinct shift from predecessor Donald Tsang, who ignored the problem. Legislators and activists, however, slammed Leung for a lack of measures to boost the supply in the short term. Some 210,000 people are on the waiting list for public housing, about double from 2006. About a third of Hong Kong's 7.1 million population lives in public rental flats. When apartments bought with government subsidies are included, the figure rises to nearly half.

Anger over housing prices is a common theme in increasingly frequent anti-government protests. Legislator Frederick Fung warns there will be more if the problem can't be solved. He compared the effect on the poor to a lab experiment.

"When we were in secondary school, we had some sort of experiment where we put many rats in a small box. They would bite each other," said Fung. "When living spaces are so congested, they would make people feel uneasy, desperate," and angry at the government, he said.

Leung, the cage dweller, had little faith that the government could do anything to change the situation of people like him.

"It's not whether I believe him or not, but they always talk this way. What hope is there?" said Leung, who has been living in cage homes since he stopped working at a market stall after losing part of a finger 20 years ago. He hasn't applied for public housing because he doesn't want to leave his roommates to live alone and expects to spend the rest of his life living in a cage.

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[yuki_ykchan]

Yes, I live in Hong Kong. That is true. Hong Kong people is poor and pity.

[jntlw]

To have either general apathy or total neglect of the poor and homeless makes God very very angry. Any city, state, country etc that neglects the plight of any of God's creatures (animals too) will feel God's wrath. The bible is full of such storis about Israel and Judah doing thee very things and then another greter power overtakes them and sends them off for 300 to 500 years. This is is more than a warning, it shows complete social /fiscal injustice and God hates injustice.

[Maguarius]

TIMETORETIRE- sorry but the bible doesn't say that

[Ericwvb]

It's stories like this that highlight the limitations of totally unfettered capitalism.

The theory from the right goes, if you make life for the poor miserable enough, people will want to not be poor so badly that they will "pull themselves up," work hard, and become rich.

The problem is that if the "free market" determines your labor is worth $100 a day and it costs $200 a day to have a reasonable standard of living, and there is no way for that person to get out of the situation they are in an get more than $100 for their labors, then it doesn't really matter how badly you want to not be poor.

Another problem is that the poorer people are, the harder they have to work to make their money. Sitting behind a desk and being a lawyer may be intellectually taxing and have taken a lot of effort and education to attain, but it doesn't compare to doing back to back shifts at a meat packing plant.

Combine that with the natural tendency for wealth to concentrate, and you can have billionaires buying up unlimited amounts of property in Hong Kong while the poor have to live in small cages.

[brasileira2]

Hopefully, now they have a sense of how the animals they torture feel like.

[judymar14]

Ditto!

[aasrslb]

I remember reading economist Milton Friedmans book years ago and he made the case that there should be no government regulation whatsoever. Nothing to regulate doctors, pharmacists, nurses or anything. His notion was that the market would sort everything out. His idea of a perfect society was Hong Kong. Nevermind that it was just a city unlike, in so many ways, to an entire country. His ideas found fertile ground in the administration of Ronald Reagan and many present day believers including Paul Ryan, Jim Demint, Marco Rubio and many others of their ilk.

Well, apparently, things are not working out as well as Mr Friedman had anticipated, in Hong Kong, but that doesn't stop his ideas from being disseminated in this country and around the world. Everyone should read this article and understand that the every body on their own approach of Misters Friedman and Reagan doesn't always work.

[Jaylah54200]

Good grief, don't let the GOP see this. They'd find it an excellent solution to this country's (ever increasing) homeless population.

[judymar14]

Our homeless would be lucky to have a 16 square ft anything to live in besides a cardboard make-shift cover. This is the fault of the Chinese government. It is the fault of the American government to have homeless at all, in this land of 'milk and honey'.

[voxpopulus]

Meanwhile, Hong Kong's Chief Executive pretends he cares about housing but absolutely refuses to countenance, for one single second, rent controls. He says it's irresponsible even to raise the subject, leaving little doubt whose side he is actually on. He is, by the way, a landlord and a property man himself.

[CBSName]

I lived in an American city which had this type of hotel some years ago. Don't know if it still exists. Interestingly, the cost of the American "cage" hotel was less than what this Hong Kong one is charging.