27.05.2022
50-foot 'Coffin Homes' Highlight The Scale of Inequality In Hong Kong
House prices in Hong Kong are among the highest in the world, but it's also one of the world's most unequal cities. Its poorest residents have been priced out of the property market: Hong Kong's poor residents have just 50 square feet of living space per person, according to a new study. That is the equivalent of half a car-parking space, and less space than prisoners in the city-state's maximum security jails enjoy. Perhaps the grimmest illustration of Hong Kong's housing shortage is its "coffin homes," the poorly-lit, minuscule, and often unhygienic apartments occupied by its very poorest citizens. The survey illustrates the stark contrast between the living conditions of rich and poor in Hong Kong, one of the world's most unequal cities. More than 1.9 million people (which is 1 in 5) were living below the poverty line in Hong kong in 2021, a 10-year high, with the government warning that weakened economy may have further repercussions on grassroots' earnings. The data showed that, before taking into account government support, the poverty rate was 23.6 percent of the population. That's up from 21.4 percent in 2020. Over the years, Hong Kong has infamously become home to 600,000 people, including 70,000 children, living inside insalubrious cubicles known as ‘coffin homes’, leaving them with few to no hopes of finding better living conditions in the future. Considering the number of residents occupying cubicles, and looking at the state of such habitations, one would obviously call Hong Kong’s coffin homes a humanitarian and health crisis. The UN even qualified it as ‘an insult to human dignity’. Only 7% of Hong Kong's island is zoned for housing, thus leading Hongkongers to live in very condensed urban areas. Sadly, while 300,000 cubicle inhabitants is a large number in itself, those cases are still a minority within the 7.39 million population of Hong Kong. Just like their homes piling up in nooks of the city, the tenants of such inhospitable housings are left aside and outcasted by many, swallowed by the effervescence of the gleaming side of Hong Kong.
Credit: INSIDER
Credit: INSIDER
Poverty deprives people of adequate education, health care and of life's most basic necessities- safe living conditions (including clean air and clean drinking water) and an adequate food supply. The developed (industrialized) countries today account for roughly 20 percent of the world's population but control about 80 percent of the world's wealth.
Poverty and pollution seem to operate in a vicious cycle that, so far, has been hard to break. Even in the developed nations, the gap between the rich and the poor is evident in their respective social and environmental conditions.
Poverty and pollution seem to operate in a vicious cycle that, so far, has been hard to break. Even in the developed nations, the gap between the rich and the poor is evident in their respective social and environmental conditions.
