Apartments So Small They Can Only Be Photographed From Above

Government intervention caused this. The government strictly controls which land can be built on, and restricts supply so much that this is what is left. If government stopped restricting which land developers could buy, build on, and sell as housing (which is a bad idea for another reasons, but not libertarian ones) then this problem would go away.

Wealth distribution on this planet is fucking terrible.

Does letting people do what they want include building without permits (esp. on allotments not designated for housing)? It doesn't work this way, governments already exercise strong control over the housing market due to laws and regulations.

I don't live in HK, but where I live, the large property funds (whose demand has nothing to do with housing) have a dramatic effect on prices - they cause an artificial shortage by purchasing everything on the market, thereby increasing the value of their own portfolio (and their rents). So just "letting people do what they want" isn't going to help the housing situation, it just increases the GDP. The government should use the increased taxes (if any - too many loopholes) to compensate the negative effects.

That said, there are a couple problems with a tiny living arrangement (as I can explain, having lived in New York for 7 years). First, very small spaces are harder to keep clean. While a 1000 SF house is easier to clean than 2000 SF, 1000 is probably easier than 500 SF (with a family of 4). Second, most people are social creatures and like the idea of being able to host larger parties (15-20 people, comfortably) in their house. If you prefer the outdoors over an active social life (like him, and to a lesser extent, like me) then this is a worthy sacrifice, but most people would dislike what a 100 SF house does to their social life. (New York is a strange exception; almost no one hosts in NYC.)

A student residence house (of course, subsidies, etc) could be had for around 250E, or even around 150E for the smallest rooms (around the 10m2 mark)

Of course, not Paris.

Fucking terrible idea. I almost certainly know more about mental illness than you do. What makes people crazy in urban areas is expensive real estate. It's not signing the ridiculous rent checks that does it-- that's just annoying. However, moving involuntarily-- especially when due to adverse economic circumstances-- has a huge detrimental effect on mental health, even inducing illnesses such as schizophrenia[0] which might otherwise be thought to be purely biological.

[0] Schizophrenia, like cancer and depression, probably isn't one disease. There are at least 5 different schizophrenias.

Next to genetics and drug abuse, the strongest predictor for mental illness is whether a person had to move involuntarily for economic reasons. Traditionally, this was a cause for the high rate of mental illness in urban areas. (However, the recent housing catastrophe was a mostly suburban phenomenon; we'll see in about 10 years if that results in suburban MI levels exceeding urban ones)

If you ban high-rises, real estate costs become extreme. Just look at what it costs to live in the Village if you don't believe me. Or look at San Francisco's problem. It's not nearly as dense as New York, but almost as expensive because of the NIMBY assholes.

Bad bad bad fucking idea.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohousing

The blue collar lunchroom. A direct descendant of the school lunchroom.

As for anecdotes, the last time I ate in a communal lunchroom was the last manual labor job I had around 1994 while in school, since then its all been eating at the desk, runnin errands, going out. My employers have all had empty lunchrooms as an anachronism, more a place to keep the coffee makers and fridges and junk food machines. Once in awhile you'll see like 4 people in a 300 person company in the lunchroom eating together, or they have birthday parties/meetings in the "lunch"room.

A friend of mine purchased a duplex house so she could live downstairs and rent out the upper floor by individual rooms. The only way she found that it worked was to have new tenants vetted by the existing ones. The 4 rooms were rented individually with shared kitchen and bathroom, but by letting the tenants have a say in who they shared the space with, turnover was very low and people tended to get along better.

Coincidentally, I'm in HK on holiday going back to Beijing tomorrow. I'm suffocating in this small hotel room....my wife did a lot of shopping, though.

Mostly younger people though.

The night buses from wanchai are full of HKers heading home to SZ.

Many of these people are trying to make a better life for themselves and especially their children. To get there, they are dealing with horrible living conditions. I salute them for that. My grandfather did something similar coming to America from Italy and his whole family is eternally grateful. Future generations of HKers are going to feel the same way.

Three bedrooms, living area, kitchen, full bathroom with possibly a half bath if it's a larger place.

Why couldn't a family of 4 be comfortable?

  I'm fairly sure if money were no object and transportation was near instant, 

Why can't we build something like that ?

Heh, I've even programmed algorithms for routing these things. There are lots of problems of course, the cars need to be extremely reliable, or you need an extremely flexible mechanical design so you can pick broken ones up from rails. But a comfortable, large, elevator takes up much less space than a car, but of course needs much more infrastructure ... Oh well, dreams ...

It really seems to be age related. When you're younger, you tend to have nothing, so embracing minimalism seems like a good way to go. As we get older and achieve some level of success, a better quality of life tends to follow, and with it more material possessions.

Later, perhaps when we become aware of the number, and perhaps the burden (maintenance, storage space, etc) of all those things, minimalism again starts to look good.

Right now I'm waiting for the kids to grow up and leave so I can talk the wife into us living on a boat :-)