HONG KONG'S CAGE HOMES

A bedspace apartment, also called cage homes, is a type of residence that is only large enough for one bunk bed surrounded by a metal cage.

Generally, the residents are low-income people, including the elderly, drug addicts, and some low-skilled or unskilled labourers. Reports from the Legislative Council of Hong Kong found that the people who lived in cage homes were those who did not qualify for social welfare or subsidised rent or electricity.

And still, with all this poverty, it's still more expensive to live in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the world, it has been ranked as the least affordable housing market in the world eight years in a row. Hundreds of thousands of residents have to squeeze into very small spaces, most of them no bigger than a parking space – such as cage homes, which are only designed to fit one person and their most precious belongings. In order to be able to afford the rising cost of these small homes, often they squeeze multiple people into one room.

The government of Hong Kong lease out land to developers at astronomical prices and make a ton of revenue from that and not have to raise taxes on the people or corporations that reside in the city. With such scarce and valuable land zoned for housing, which is exactly 3.7% of Hong Kong's land that is high-density urban management, this means that there is not a land shortage, its just bad land management.

See the video for a more detailed look into why the people of Hong Kong are paying 20 times more for a place to stay than their annual income.