Research: Hong Kong housing problem: Cage house/ Coffin Cubicles

Inspiration artwork by @oliwabiu

Hong Kong is brimming with neon-lit shopping strips that sell luxury brands, jewels, and technology to eager consumers; the skyscraper-filled skyline contains businesses that make the city one of the world’s major financial hubs. Yet behind the glamorous facade, approximately 200,000 people, including 40,000 children, live in spaces ranging in size from around 15 – 100 square feet.

With a population of nearly 7.5 million and almost no developable land remaining, Hong Kong’s housing market has risen to the most expensive in the world. Pushed out by soaring rents, tens of thousands of people have no other option than to inhabit squatter huts, sub-divided units where the kitchen and toilet merge, coffin cubicles, and cage homes, which are rooms measuring as small as 6’ x 2.5’ traditionally made of wire mesh. To create the coffin cubicles a 400 square flat will be illegally divided by its owner to accommodate 20 double-decker beds, each costing about HK$2000 (over $250 USD) per month in rent. The space is too small to stand up in.

This is the interior of a 400 square foot flat tucked away in the mezzanine of a dilapidated building in Sham Shui Po—one of the poorest, yet also most rapidly gentrifying regions in Hong Kong, a city known for its sky-high property prices, extreme wealth inequality, free-wheeling capitalism, and more recently, anti-Beijing protests that have met with an even tighter control by China over the region it regained in 1997 from the British who ruled it for over 150 years. As the city marks 25 years of the handover, and finds itself in the centre of a global power struggle between the U.S. and China, new concerns have been raised over the city’s shrinking space for civil and political debate and participation. There is far less global outrage at an old problem: its stark inequality. The so-called “cage homes”, like this one in Sham Shui Po, are its most glaring manifestation.

Roughly one in five Hongkongers lived under the poverty line, discounting for government welfare. With welfare support, the official figure is kept at around 8%, which is still more than half a million people. Over 220,000 people live in so-called “subdivided flats”, a dainty euphemism for the 4 by 4 by 6 ft spaces that the city’s poor, downtrodden, disabled, and neglected are crammed into at night. Out of sight, out of mind.

Yet, many of these tenants are by no means invisible at day. They are, in fact, ubiquitous, cleaning the city’s streets and sewers, loading and unloading its merchandise, waiting on customers at the thousands of restaurants dotting the metro, and manning shop counters and offices. They constitute the army of workers who keep Asia’s financial hub buzzing, but are so poorly paid that they can’t rent, let alone purchase, decently sized apartments. It shouldn’t take $700 a month to pay for the primitive shelter they take refuge in – but in a city where more than half of young adults make less than the median wage and it takes on average six years for a family to be allocated public housing, living with dignity—or some semblance of it—doesn’t come cheap.

In the subconscious of some of the city’s more privileged citizens lies the conception that cage homes – and their residents – belong to a fundamentally different Hong Kong, one that is both alien and non-existent. One that should be distanced from and pitied in equal parts – as the news cycle lusts for flashier and more excitable narratives of the city: whether it be its status as a financial and commercial gateway for China, or its persisting symbolism as a geopolitical fault line between two competing ideologies. In the eyes of many who have long benefited from Hong Kong’s excesses, radical poverty is a fait accompli. As it is for those who toil away at day and sleep in shoeboxes at night.

It shouldn’t be.

In his series called “Trapped,” Lam wants to illuminate the suffocating dwellings that exist where the lights of Hong Kong’s prosperity don’t reach. He hopes by making the tenants and their homes visible, more people will start paying attention to the social injustices of their circumstances.