Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods | Hacker News Reader

Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods

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142 pointsSparksZilla76 comments

I used to -- and still do, to some effect -- fetishize living in a highrise. I was a suburban kid who grew up in a boring (and, in retrospect, wonderful) house surrounded by other boring houses -- I watched Seinfeld and Frasier, and loved the idea of living in an apartment complex, where prospective friends and plotlines were only yards and floors away.

Looking at Michael's pictures, I'm struck with a particular sense of envy -- I realize, knowing what I know about median Hong Kong quality of living, that its likely unpleasant to live in these conditions. And yet, the sheer mathematics of it -- twenty thousand tenants divided by sixty floors is around three hundred per floor -- makes me smile at so many imaginary hallway interactions.

Grass is always greener on the other side. Living in Hong Kong right now I do miss living in a detached house in suburban Melbourne. A lot.

And no, we rarely see anyone else in the hallway, and even when we do we don't say hi to each other.

You can always start. My grand mother who lives there talks to everyone on the elevator.

Or use Wechat's "look around" feature. I don't recall if it is widely used in Hong Kong but in China I have met a few neighbors this way.

Travelling in the US, this Australian found that Americans are far more likely to start a conversation with a total stranger, apropos of nothing. It's so rare here, but pretty commonplace there.

So... just try saying 'hello' - it may just be cultural reticence on your part.

Whenever I pass someone in a quiet street and there's often that awkward moment, I think about the thousands of years we've evolved in smaller tribes and communities. And how poorly we are prepared as animals for purposeless encounters with others.

I'm not sure if this makes sense from a scaling perspective looking at the ratio of perimeter to area as size scales up, we are now far more likely to only casually meet members of our own "tribe" than ever before in history.

Think of multiple tribes "sharing" a watering hole or a hunting ground or simply plain old common borders.

I think we're pretty well prepared for it, as long as we're not at war we seem to have a pretty good ability to be casual, ignore them, yet unconsciously keep an eye on them and if they start acting weird (about to stab us in the back).

Cities aren't "tribes," they're far too large. In fact, they're tribe destroyers. From an evolutionary perspective, interaction with other people was meaningful: either you were interacting with a tribesman (basically a member of extended family) or with an outsider. In neither case was "indifference" a desirable response (outsiders evoke competitive fear or interest). In a city you interact with so many different people on a daily basis that almost all human interactions are, by necessity, marked by indifference.

We're not designed to simply ignore people. However, more and more that's what we are required to do.

I carefully considered your position and partially agree with some aspects of it.

If you are correct, that would imply that over a very long term, the total level of "drama" would be decreasing over time in the average life as city size increases etc. I disagree. Also a decline in actual drama below some instinctual drama-thermostat in the brain would result in increasing levels of interest over the centuries in artificial drama (plays, gossip, TV, social media, maybe religion). I'm not seeing that either. I would theorize that changing technological tools for artificial drama have changed the method of stimulation but not the quantity, although I don't have enough data to know if I'm right or wrong. Its rare in the social sciences to have the chance for a hard numbers science experiment like this, which makes this topic interesting. In theory, for example, over the past generation, interest in traditional cultural plays in China should have exploded upwards thru several orders of magnitude. On the other side, there has been explosive growth (perhaps a fad?) in social media.

I would also make a very small correction to your last line:

"However, more and more that's what we are required to do."

should have two words added:

"However, more and more that's what we are required to appear to do."

For example, I would theorize based on this that the total amount of "checking out the ladies" is constant among males of a similar hormonal level across all cultures, what varies is the resulting behavior after paying attention (some places catcalling is the law of the land, some places no one whistles, ditto staring, and many other reactions, it only varies in male reaction, not in the quantity of male attention)

I would agree that the prevailing behavior in the west is to pretend to ignore, while paying very close attention. Don't make eye contact with the pan handler but keep an eye on him in the unlikely event that he pulls a knife. She wore that so you'd check her out, duh, but not to make you outright stare, duh. Pretending to ignore is somewhat different than actually ignoring.

i assure you, from personal experience, you are right that it's unpleasant to live in these conditions. and whatever hallway interactions you have with neighbors is either unpleasant, or neutral (as in, you smile and move on, no conversation).

and if you're used to living in a nice house in a suburban neighborhood, imagine a 3-bedroom apartment squeezed into a space that's approximately your living room. i once lived in one of these apartments, and the kitchen is literally only big enough for one person to stand inside and the bedrooms are basically dorm rooms. unless you're very wealthy, then you might be able to live in an apartment or condo that's actually spacious and nice but then you'd be looking to pay a ridiculous amount of rent money.

I live in an apartment in Tokyo (not any near as cramped as these places, though). I've stayed at guest houses in Hong Kong and Tokyo. I love it. I don't miss living in a house at all. (I sure don't miss mowing the lawn or shoveling snow off the sidewalk, either.)

I used to romanticize about these kinds of places. I explored them a bit and I liked it. (These days, I'm living in a fairly normal apartment, though. Normal job, normal life.)

I've stayed at guesthouses where I've had lots of socializing with the neighbors. I've had some fun times (and some not-so-fun times...) If you're curious, give it shot!...

https://www.google.com/search?q=hong+kong+living+in+cages&tb...

One apartment may be filled with workers living in small cages stacked three or four high.

25 years ago i used to live in public housing in HK where there are around ~60 apartments (~400 sq. ft) each floor. hallway interactions are common, we even leave the door open so people can have a quick chat when neighbor passes by.

Nowadays more people live in private housing, usually 8-10 apartments each floor. And people hardly know the last name of their neighbors. Not knowing who lives next door is the norm in HK private/subsidized housing now...

Spacehunt and gotrecruit are on the money.

Even if you spend 3-4x more than the average household's entire monthly income so that you live in a flat that's almost got half as much usable space as a typical suburban home in, for example, the US, you've got your neighbors to contend with.

The exorbitant rent or mortgage that you're paying only buys you a bit of extra elbow room (likely translated into more bedrooms and a coffin-like chamber into which your domestic helper, i.e. maid, is supposed to be banished at the end of their workday) and a better address. That money doesn't translate into a higher quality of construction. Everything is built as cheaply as possible and buildings begin to degrade pretty much as soon as they're put up for sale. There's no insulation and floors/ceilings are very thin.

Upstairs neighbor's child practicing piano at midnight ahead of a piano exam that they have to pass so that they can cram another cert for another activity into their portfolio for school applications? Their dog(s), which they keep in a cage or exile to the balcony at night, barking or whining? Deal with it. Down-the-hall neighbor having an epic, all-night mahjong tournament and the neverending ka-lakka-lakka-lak-lak sound of the tiles driving you bonkers? Watching a football/soccer match on their TV and bellowing every time that "their" team scores a goal? Deal with it. Condensation from someone's air conditioner dripping from a great height and impacting one of your air conditioners (or a nearby neighbor's) with a loud twang! every few seconds? Deal with it.

Then, there are the sidewalks. Thirty-floor (and taller) highrises are the norm, but the sidewalks tend to be the same size as the ones in a low-density suburb ... or smaller. At peak periods, trying to navigate the sidewalks without getting elbowed or shoved into a railing or wall or (worst case) off the curb and into traffic, is an adventure. At off-peak periods, you'll play air conditioner drip Frogger and try to get to your destination without being slimed with a melange of condensation, pigeon poop, and algae/mold/bacteria by inferring a safe path from the locations of puddles on the sidewalk. Aiyah! Look out! Here comes a guy pushing a metal cart laden with 3-liter cans of corn oil barreling towards you down the sidewalk!

My dad always tells me any apartments look glossy only in their first year of construction. After that, things start to degrade pretty quickly. Start with paint, then window glasses and then leaks and then what not. All the best trying to get every one to pay up to fix the issues related to the general apartment building. It never happens.

Unless you are living in a super luxury apartment, I see high rise residential buildings as nothing more than modern day slums and ghettos.

The biggest annoyances you come across are the ones related to privacy and hygiene.

Your father is wise.

Hong Kong high rises are immensely varied. there's a huge amount of postwar public housing of a pretty crummy (if solid) construction. there's also some new apartments that are of a much higher quality than you'd generally see in the west. there's also some new crummy apartments (sometimes marketed as high quality).

space is at a premium though and needs must. also - this density is only possible because the government once appropriated and consolidated so much land

I see high rise residential buildings as nothing more than modern day slums and ghettos.

Some people prefer to live in cities, for example people who are driven to earn lots of money, people seeking higher education or cultural experience, people looking for partners, etc. For those people, depending upon the density of the urban environment and their will to dedicate significant portions of their waking hours to a soulless commute, sometimes that means there's no other option but these buildings.

That said, I basically share your perspective. After living in apartments throughout Asia and London for a decade, I really enjoyed being in a house again in Los Angeles and am currently considering building one somewhere in remote New Zealand. My thinking is that high density cities are lovely to visit, but quality of life for the nine-to-five cityslicker typically sux. The 'burbs aint that much better, given commute overheads, an often broadly similar lack of nature and, per capita, not entirely dissimilar rents (despite the extra space afforded).

One point nobody seems to have made is that capital for buying houses is virtually free in Hong Kong .. something like 1-3% interest IIRC.

There are nicer neighbourhoods though where you don't have to deal with most of that, where buildings are properly maintained, people keep quiet after 11pm on most nights, and you don't have go on the sidewalk for the walk to the train station.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating it here. In fact whenever I'm back in Melbourne I miss having an entire shopping centre plus the train station literally just downstairs from home.

I've lived in public housing in Singapore and have experienced the noise (and sometimes worse) of neighbors above and below. The cheapness of construction is definitely a factor in the experience - in nicer (private) apartments, there's less disturbance, and less chance of being dripped on by an air conditioner or hung-out washing.

That said, when I visited Hong Kong, I stood at the base of the gigantic blocks of housing there and marveled at how they were the equivalent of small towns. They're:

- significantly taller than most Singaporean public housing

- have more shops packed on their ground levels

- packed much closer (very little space between blocks)

so they really feel a whole different level of dense (and Singapore is very dense already). Staring up at their brutally uniform towering shapes is quite the feeling. If they were interconnected and had open corridors between blocks, I could imagine playing a rather interesting game of tag across many buildings. I guess that's pretty much what the Kowloon Walled City[1] was.

Dense megacities are interesting in their own right, even if they're not nice to live in (as dystopic cities in cyberfunk fiction show). Now I live in a house, but I miss the conveniences of being able to walk to a shop or bus stop/subway stop in 5 minutes.

[1] Incidentally, an arcade in Kawasaki, Japan recreated the Kowloon Walled City - check out the rather interesting photographs at http://randomwire.com/kowloon-walled-city-rebuilt-in-japan - it's going on my list of places to visit.

I always think the opposite way, that getting lost in the anonymity of the crowds is highly appealing to me.

In my experience the larger the apartment building you live in, the less likely that your neighbors will acknowledge you. Unless its a condo/coop where there are association meetings, and then everyone is in your face all the time.

The most social place I've ever lived was a fenced community of detached 1BR bungalows in Los Angeles. Most likely because it housed primarily unemployed actors who spent most of their day hanging out in communal spaces chatting. I think this has a lot to do with the perception of life in TV shows, they write from what they know, and what they know is living in LA. Seinfeld and Frasier have much more in common with life in small Hollywood low-rise apartments than they do with life in the type of high-density high-rise that you find in NYC...

There is a fortunate side effect to living in such tiny spaces. Having spent a couple of years living in what could be considered submariner sized dwellings, I found that the only thing I used the spaces for was sleeping. When one lives in a tiny, depressing hole, one tends to maximise the time spent out in the world doing things and socializing. With all of that activity I lost weight too.

There is a tendency to beautify and manicure our dwellings as if they were tombs in which to be eternally housed, sometimes with the result us of not wanting to leave them.

When you were living in a cozy apartment, did it happen to be in a city where free, public conveniences (like greenery, shaded benches, water fountains, etc.) were rare to nonexistent, situated in a region where the climate was extremely hot and humid year-round?

I ask because I live in such a city and socializing seems to take the form (for the affluent) of, for example, sweaty people buying overpriced iced coffees so that they have an excuse to sit in an air conditioned cafe and (for the less well-off) of people, especially the elderly, sitting on ledges, steps, the rare bench or two, etc. in air conditioned shopping malls, libraries, and government buildings all day.

No, it wasn't in such cities. They were, however, equipped with excellent public transportation, which certainly lowers the barriers to going out.

Having lived in several buildings identical to the ones in a couple of the photos for nearly a decade I can assure you there is nothing very nice about living in them. The lifts and the hallways have no air conditioning. The flats themselves are really really really small, you can fit a queen size bed into the larger bedroom, but you're left with enough room to ease into the room sideways. The worst is during Jan to early March when you get 6-8 weeks of cold weather. It's only down around 10C but the buildings aren't insulated and everything is made of tile, so the wind slices through the walls and the tiles suck the heat out of your body. A lot of these housing blocks are built on top of enormous shopping malls, or train stations or both. And getting to and from work every day means pushing your way through what my Chinese wife used to call "a sea of people" which people in the West would only see if you went into a city for fourth of july, or new years eve fireworks.... And the pace of life there makes NYC feel like a backwater village. There truly is no place like Hong Kong on the planet.

That said, my time in Hong Kong was perhaps the happiest of my entire life. And you get used to living on top of everyone else. I'm headed there next month, which is only a 1.5 hour flight from Phnom Penh. I can't wait. There is a little noodle shop in Dai Wai that I've been dreaming about for two months now....

I'm headed back to Phnom Penh after 3 months of Euro summer. Haven't bumped into many coding types back when I was there (Jan-May) but then I've been staring too much into my own codez all the while.. wanna hang for hacker coffee after 4th September, then just get in touch!

One of the reasons for such high housing costs is the influx of investment money. For example, this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beverly_Hills apartment complex is mostly empty. Most of the houses bought up by rich mainlanders looking to park their money somewhere that would still grow their investment.

Secondly, there are cheaper alternatives. Living in teh New Territories can be tremendously more cash efficient. I live in the hills in a house, 2 floors, 3 bedroom, with a garden, and pay less than $2500 USD per month.

Totally correct.

Now, if you told HN the net floor area of your $USD 2.5k-a-month village house and the dimensions of your 3 bedrooms, you'd probably shock many posters here.

Correct.

What few realize though is that the archaic pegged exchange rate is the key contributor to this. In a typical exchange regime, such an influx of capital would push the exchange rate higher and provide a balancing effect. Instead, you get asset price inflation while wages in local currency remain flat. This makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. [1]

Compounding the effect is the inability to have any kind of independent monetary policy since the rate is pegged and there are no currency controls. Consider an economy with strong growth, 6% inflation, and interest rates on home mortgages of .....~1%? Welcome to HK.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-06-18/hong-kong-s-weal...

"In Hong Kong, Rich Live In Mountain Mansions And Poor Live In Cages"

http://www.businessinsider.com/hong-kong-rich-live-in-mansio...

I think it wouldn't be too far out to guess that the eventual end of planet earth is to be covered with structures like in the article posted and people living in it along the lines of the one linked here.

How many people could you cram in like that?

Hope you like to eat fish.

First, Don't take such a dim view! There is no reason why the buildings can't be twice as high and twice as roomy.

Secondly, We be living off soylent

Are (many of) the apartments privately owned in this scenario?

If so, then everyone who has already bought an apartment and everyone who stands to inherit such an apartment will "lose" money or the opportunity to convert their real estate into money in the future if newer apartments are more spacious or nicer in any obvious way.

Real estate developers will have less difficulty selling the units that they build right now if buyers are confident that future apartments will not be nicer (and hence more desirable to future buyers) than the apartments that you're trying to fob off on them today.

It's a feedback mechanism that, unchecked, leads to what you find in HK: progressively slightly smaller, more unpleasant apartments being built with every passing year.

Up to 60 floors / 20,000 people in an apartment building? I didn't realize that existed. I don't think you'd find an apartment building in the US that has even a fraction of that. The largest hotel in New York is the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. It has 49 floors / 1,949 rooms, which I don't think comes close to 20,000 people; I couldn't find the exact occupancy.

The Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town in New York has eleven thousand tenants, which is at least a fraction.

But that's the ENTIRE residential development block - NOT a single building as denoted in the original post. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Stu...

According to cousin comments this stat is per development block

I found a mention online that the average household size in Hong Kong is 3 people (in 2006).

So that's 20,000 people over 60 floors, 3 per apartment. That's 100 apartments on a floor! They must be incredibly compact if those numbers are correct.

It's actually usually a set of half a dozen same shaped buildings. See the first image in the article.

The 20k figure would be referring to the development, which would be several "blocks" (i.e. independent buildings crammed next to each other).

The average household size is still 3 (bit lower in public housing) with average living space per person of ~140 square feet. Keep in mind that those 140 square feet are measured based on the outside of the building!

Huh? The W Times Square has 55 floors.

US Naval academy, the entire 4000 person university lives in one gigantic dorm building. That's the largest dorm I can think of, at least in the USA. I've never seen it personally, but I've heard its spectacular and seen some interesting pictures of the luxurious common areas.

If you permit skywalks to make one large building, technically most of downtown Minneapolis and (I think?) Toronto would be one big building. If you define "a building" as you can walk from one place to another indoors.

I don't think interaction scales as well as some think, I lived in a 13 floor roughly 600 person dorm at university and as I think back I never set foot on perhaps a third of the floors, and spent the vast majority of my time on just two floors. So making it 100 floors tall would primarily mean I'd almost never visit about 90 of the floors rather than almost never visiting about 10 of them.

This also happens horizontally, not just vertically. I live in a 580 square mile county. I spend the vast majority of my time, probably over 99%, in about 4 of those 580 square miles. That's just kind of how life is, lots of sleeping, gathering and consuming food, working, raising/educating kids... I believe my county nears the size of the state of Rhode Island, however I don't think social interaction is much different merely because the lines on a map are closer together.

I have lived rural, suburban, and urban, and my limited observation is ignoring each other is a defense mechanism. So in rural areas we were all practically blood brothers simply by virtue of being neighbors, but in urban apartments I would not even know my neighbors names. Suburban is somewhere in between.

(Google Street View) https://maps.google.de/maps?ll=22.335737,114.14855&spn=0.002...

> After years of living in a small house in Hong Kong’s countryside...

Hong Kong has countryside?!?

Lots of it.

The Hong Kong we tend to think of is the very densely populated Hong Kong Island and Kowloon area across the bay. Actually there is a huge area beyond Kowloon to the north known as the New Territories which is much less developed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Territories

Hiking is fun there.

Yes and some nice beaches too.

The countryside consists of the hilliest bits, which the government and developers pretend that they can't build on (Don't look here or there at the hilltops with towering apartment blocks perched on them, it'll spoil your suspension of disbelief) and the flat spots which the government hasn't yet chosen to build a "new town" (i.e. insta-city) on and which tend to be non-trivial to reach since mass transit hasn't been extended that far since the government hasn't yet chosen to build a "new town" there since...

What's happened is that a small number of wealthy families have basically completely captured HK and "real estate" accounts for a huge chunk of the local economy. HK residents and, increasingly, PRC citizens seeking a way to smuggle ill-gotten money out of the PRC proper park their money in the form of tiny cement apartments which they have no particular need to rent out to anyone since there's a prolonged property tax holiday in effect.

The value of tiny cement apartments only stays high so long as there's the appearance of scarcity of tiny cement apartments. This requires the apparent scarcity of land.

Open google map and turn on the satellite mode. You will see there are lots of green areas in Hong Kong.

Green != countryside (at least not what I think of as countryside). If you look at a map of Manhattan you'll see a big swatch of green in the middle (Central Park) but that's not countryside. I've actually been to Hong Kong, and I've even been outside the city. I saw a lot of undeveloped hills. But I didn't see anything I would call "countryside." But maybe I'm just quibbling over terminology, and what the author means by "countryside" I think of as "the outskirts of the city."

Less than 25% of the total land area of HK (~400 sq. mi.) is developed.[1]

[1] http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/facts.htm

Does the total land area include the mountains, or only the habitable regions?

It includes everything. Hong Kong is a pretty small place.

Most of Hong Kong is undeveloped land (and a lot of that is undeveloped because it is protected national park). This is why you end up with such high density despite so much land with only 7 million people.

Also, let's face it. It's very difficult to reason about the interior of a building from pictures of its exterior. Who knows how nice these apartments are? I grant that many of them are not probably up to the standards Americans are used to, but the mildew from the tropical climate and various other factors conspire to make things look worse than they are, I bet.

And most of them have a choice of multiple ISPs offering 1Gbps FTTH for about US$20-40 a month...

Of course they do. The cost to run fiber to a building is largely independent of the number of units in the building. So it makes perfect sense that higher housing density leads to lower costs and higher speeds.

Based on my experience living in a small town in England five minutes walk away from rolling, open fields, I suggest that what leads to lower costs and higher speeds is actual competition between broadband suppliers, rather than regulatory capture and cartels. I understand that it's common in the US for high-density housing areas to have very little choice, poor service, and to pay a fortune for their internet.

OK. As long as we're giving anecdotes, I live in high-density housing in the US, and pay $50 for 200 Mbps symmetric service. Service which is only available in buildings above a certain size.

Yes. But keep in mind that minimum wages is $3.75/hour with no paid breaks.

Also, that's your connection speed to the ISP's network. As soon as your traffic leaves HK, you're more likely looking at < 10 Mbps

Nope, I get 100+ Mbps to at least Taiwan and Japan, according to speedtest.net.

That's quite fast. I see ~10-12 Mbps to Taiwan/Japan from both home (200 Mbps fiber) and office (1 Gbps fiber).

To the US, I see ~4-5 Mbps consistently. These are both via PCCW.

Weird, I'm also on PCCW. Results from tests I just performed, over Wifi though so not that accurate:

- Japan: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2924783412

- US: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2924790093

Many of those apartments are subdivided into smaller apartments. Entire family may live in just 40-square-foot apartment.

You don't mean 40 square meters?

hannibal5 might be referring to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivided_flat

No, he means 40 square feet. As in about 4 square meters.

Note that the average size of these arrangements, from spacehunt's link, is about 2.8 sq meters per person, so about 11m^2 for a 4-person family. And some are presumably below average.

There have been a number of photo exhibits showing exactly that. I assure you, things are worse than you imagine.

http://petapixel.com/2013/02/19/cramped-apartments-in-hong-k...

I watched Dredd on Netflix a few days ago, and I'm struck by how similar these apartments and the blocks in the movie look.

The set design and sense of claustrophobia induced by Dredd was brilliant.

They even had accurate looking graffiti.

It was an exceptionally well designed set.

Thanks, just watched it. I love dystopic movies. And I agree.

Price for Flat and Rental by income average are highest of anywhere on earth. And NO, New Territories aren't cheap either. Heck even flat in Out Skirt Island are expensive.

Business Monopoly by a few companies. Not necessarily a bad thing since South Korea are the same too. Except Samsung manage to feed to poor and give back to the country. Even with so much evil going on with them they still have some decency to their own country. And yet these companies in Hong Kong are much more about extracting all they can from Hong Kongers while not making contribution.

Government has zero direction on where to go, no leadership what so ever. No idea where the problems are. And unwilling to solve it.

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http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hong+kong+birth+rate

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