high rises vs basements

China is crowded. Ridiculously crowded. Everywhere you look there are huge high rise buildings. In America these types of buildings are typically businesses, here 90% of the time they are apartments, and that percentage goes up the further out of a big city you get. Taking the train through the countryside you will randomly see clusters of identical high rises that are all apartments. Naturally most of the Chinese live in buildings such as these, due to the land to people ratio. Also, if they want to live near civilization, they must live in an apartment. They will often buy them though, and sometimes the buildings even have something similar to an HOA.

It's interesting how they build these immense complexes; if the plan is to have ten of the same building within the complex, they will not start and finish one and move on to the next, they will start all ten and take forever to finish them all.

Whether or not you can see them, there are ten cranes pictured here.

Apparently when many of these high rises were built, investors bought a large number of the apartments (a building is not built until all the money to do so is accounted for). Now they want to charge a very high rent for the Chinese to live in them, which the Chinese cannot afford. The investors will not sell because the market is down, so they hold these apartments and keep them vacant, instead of just lowering the asking rent to generate some income even if it is not the desired amount. Because of this, MANY of these high rises are completely empty.

This forces a lot of the Chinese to live in tiny, shared basements under the complexes. They sleep in large dormitory style rooms where they share bunk beds with people they do not know and share bathrooms with large numbers of strangers as well. They have virtually no personal space. If they are lucky enough to be able to afford a single room in a basement, it will not be nice.

The whole setup seems crazy and so unfortunate.