Hong Kong's Cage Homes: Urban Housing At Its Starkest

by Nikhil Sundaram    July 23, 2008

In modern cities,even the ones in the developed countries,the presence of slums are almost ubiquitous.Every city has it's own share of slum dwellings.

Slum dwellings come in varied forms.They may be makeshift tents that can be put up for a night's sleep before being folded and kept aside once day breaks.They can also be unplanned patch works of concrete and bricks made by dwellers turned masons or amateur
builders.

But if there ever has to be a prize for the most amazing piece of 'residential' place in a city that can be a commentary on how modern technological and economic advances have also created a certain disparity of incomes which has led to the marginalisation of the poor to a great extent,then it has to be the 'Cage Homes' of Hong Kong.Kong Siu-kau stays in one such home.His residence is a 6ftX2ft cage where he stays along with his other 'cage mates'.He has 10 other cage mates who stay in the same room as him.

This is a place for the elderly and poor men on social welfare.They pay almost HK$1,200 a month as rent to stay in these cages.And these cages they call home are no bigger than a coffin.

The city that is home to 40 billionaires is also the one that houses these cage men.It is the starkest symbols of abject poverty in an otherwise flourishing nation.The cause of these cage homes are the ever rising costs of urban homes and the lack of spaces.In the 1950s, the arrival of a flood of immigrants from newly liberated mainland China created a demand for low-cost bedspace apartments for low-wage earners. Apartment owners, looking to extract more money per square foot of living space, packed in iron cages that served as bunk beds, stacked three or four together. This is how ‘cage homes’ came to be.

According to an Oxfam study,Ever since China opened up in the 1980s,low-income factory jobs went from Hong Kong across the border.Hence in the absence of a minimum wage,real wages took a hit and fell sharply.And since Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule,the wealth gap has only worsened.The study also states that one out every six persons in Hong Kong lives in poverty,and about 500000 are living on social welfare.

Cage homes represent  the starkest truth about urban tenements if next only to 'sleeping under the open skies without a roof to call one's own'.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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