Hacker News Reader

Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

My uneducated guess: the denser, convenient and efficient a city is, the harder it will be to maintain that level of comfort in the outskirts or remote places and people will progressively move to the concentrated areas.

We often hear people arguing that having cheap broadband in all local areas is just impossible, and I read it as "no young adult will want to live in those areas when they've the choice to move out on their own". Broadband being just one example.

View on HN

I can shed some light on this. Most of these villages began their demise around the middle to late middle of the last century, before or during the upsurge of the economy that would lead to the city's boom times. Times were very tough, especially out in the sticks, so those that could move abroad, or send their kids abroad, did. That is a large part of why you have a huge ex-Hong Kong community in the UK, Canada, Australia, etc. Entire villages cleared out.

The thing is, they moved but most often retained land rights. So those villages fell into disrepair as people moved but the houses and plots of land usually belong to families that have lived abroad for one, two or three generations now. They could be developed but so far there's little incentive for people to do so, despite the high property prices (those that were very successful abroad instead bought property in Hong Kong's new towns and have seen asset values skyrocket).

Hong Kong's government has historically been very good at providing services for the outlying areas. The many villages that did not end up abandoned have for decades had all the amenities, with stable power, clean water, fiberoptic broadband and often gas as well.

Don't they have adverse possession laws that would clear the land rights after a decade or so ? (UK and most countries have, I have expected HK to have to)

I'm not sure about adverse possession, but my understanding is that the church behind Cheung Kong Centre is the only place in Hong Kong that privately owns land rather than leasing land from the government for 99 years. It would be better to sort out efficient use of land before the leases need renewal, but at least there's a mechanism to reclaim truly unused land.

No, in these cases the right to build one house lasts for the duration of one male heir since 1972. There are also restrictions on the conditions of sale if I’m not mistaken, which makes it more difficult to sell off to big developers.

Yup. I came from a small town of 300 people. Of my graduating class of 11, 1 stayed put and the rest moved to more urban areas.

There's just a bunch of issues with being semi remote.

Unless you can land remote work (good luck) jobs are basically have a family farm, work in the school, or work for a state agency maintaining roads, or commute for an hour to a city with more jobs.

Then there's the lack of services, it's basically "want food, entertainment, hospital care? Welp, you are going to have to travel for an hour to get any of that". You pretty much have to leave the town if you want more than a high school education.

Quiet literally the only thing going on in the city is high school sports.

But hey, with small towns that also generally means that everyone knows everyone. Which can be good if you like community, but also can be real bad if you don't want to live where everyone has their nose in everyone else's business.

But then, that was a small town. There's a large number of "communities" where instead of farmers putting their house close together they keep the "homes on the range". Which, as you can imagine, takes people that want isolation to want to live in those places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com