China: Bulldozes Kowloon Walled City
Also China:
I don’t trust China after their tofu-dreg reputation. I’m sure this building is structurally sound but I just don’t trust living in it.
The sewage pipe at the bottom must be ginormous
Sewage? …pipe?
Delivery guy was there.
That’s my entire town in one building
that’s 2 to 3 cities worth of people
How do people live like this. Id jump.
Its sad. There’s enough land on earth for every adult to have 1.5 acres.
You can have 1.5 acres of Sahara desert. I’ll pass…
If you want your 1.5 acres, you better not complain that the bus comes twice a day and the only doctor in the area retired 3 years ago.
Bus?
They’re saying you’ll be living in a remote place with no regular bus
I was joking.
I already dont have a bus where I live haha
He just said it goes twice a day, though.
But yeah, I get what he meant.
I wouldn’t mind though, I am from a town which literally had two buses a day going to the city. On Sundays, but still. But with a car it took like 25-30min to the city.
Yeah for sure, the bus here is maybe twice a day and I really wouldn’t rely on it
We just need to wipe out all the animals and forests first, but we’re on track for everyone to have their own real soon tho.
Iunno, ignoring concerns about the building being structurally sound, this seems pretty great. Assuming there are some amenities inside as well most of what you need is close by, and after going out the (admittedly probably 2-3 minutes away) front door you’re greeted by a small park.
One single letter box.
Just do what my delivery drivers do. Leave it at the main entrance and mark it delivered.
If there is tofu dreg in the construction, the architect and builders are gonna charged with a genocide. (if building collapse, thousands die)
And this is not because American propaganda or whatever. My family is from mainland China and my mother told me about all those tofu-dreg stuff. To be very clear, this is not the people’s fault, its not individuals being “lazy”, its a systematic issue. There’s so much corruption and bribery.
Food safety is another one of the big issues. For a supposedly “socialist” government, they sure are doing quite a lot regulating food, by “a lot” I mean jack shit.
I’m suspecting if my older brother is being an asshole because he lived there like approximately 5 years longer there and suffered some food poisoning (like maybe lead) or something and totally has zero empathy. Parents are also shitty. I mean there has got to be lead or something.
(No I did not live in one of these mega buildings lol, mine was more like a 10 story building, no elevators, lackluster of safety barriers. I hate that place lol, so much bad memories of my abusive older brother.)
It’s locust mentality, same thing happens in India or any country with high density + a culture of low trust.
If the CCP wasn’t headed by morons like Mao (and Xi by extension, who for some unfathomable reason wants to emulate him) who brought the destruction of Confucius teachings and heritage through the cultural revolution and terrible economic policies, they had a baseline culture to foster a more cohesive and trusting society.
For a supposedly “socialist” government, they sure are doing quite a lot regulating food, by “a lot” I mean jack shit.
I’m reading “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”, which I think is a great book, and one of its themes, that probably seems strange to Americans, is that China is more capitalist than the United States right now.
For instance, from what I read, the CCP is extremely reluctant to provide any kind of social welfare, in the belief welfare will make its citizens lazy, and the little that exists is not only incredibly corrupt but requires a degrading means testing process that even the worst American conservative would think goes too far.
But I’ve never lived in China so you may know better about that.
that China is more capitalist than the United States right now
Exactly lol, this is what I’ve been saying.
CCP is extremely reluctant to provide any kind of social welfare, in the belief welfare will make its citizens lazy
That’s my parent’s view on welfare. These views carried over to the US too. Its why they see a headline about “illegal immigrants” to the US and they start blaming welfare and think that “illegal” immigrants are somehow getting welfare and they think its taking away resources from legal immigrants. Its why they think me having depression is “weakness”. My mother told me she hates autistic people because she thinks they are “dangerous”. Like people with disabilities get would disowned by a lot of parents. If you have any disabilities, you don’t get viewd as a person, but a 廢柴 (I’d say it’s equivalent to “useless eater”). Its so messed up.
Food safety is another one of the big issues.
They cracked down on people cleaning cooking oil and reselling it as food oil again, they executed the people responsible for poisonous baby formula, they seem to do something when it becomes noisy.
I got mild food poisoning in China less frequently than in Korea or Vietnam.
I can’t compare to Japan, because while the food safety seems very good, its not because of regulation, restaurants there don’t even have regular inspections.
High density housing bad and dystopian. Homelessness good. Now build more single family homes with lawns pls. /s
Low-rise to mid-rise high-density housing, sure, but high-rises are bad, yes. They cost more to maintain, they either prevent adequate sunlight at lower levels or need to be spaced apart wide enough to defeat the point, and they tend to be worse for social isolation and anti-social behaviour.
High rises give way to urban density and walkable neighborhoods. Any costs in maintenance is easily offset by freeing hundreds of people from the costs of car ownership, medical costs due to sedentary lifestyles in unwalkable suburbs, provide more affordable and accessible community funded childcare, better access to healthy foods than in food deserts enforced by zoning, and reduction in homelessness related crimes.
Nothing is more socially isolating than car-centric suburban hell where anyone too young or too old to drive are deemed ineligible to leave their house independently and participate in society. Nothing creates anti-social behavior like forcing homelessness and desperation onto people who cannot afford to live in cities that are lacking in affordable public housing.
Speaking as someone who has lived in both urban highrise public housing and suburban hells in different parts of the world, the most socially isolating experience by far has been living in car-depedent suburbs with piss poor public transit, especially as someone who cannot drive often. Every will eventually become disabled and cannot drive. It’s just a matter of when. When that time comes, you better hope you can afford a retirement home or to have someone drive you, because if you can’t, you’re stuck right where you are. And that times sooner the less walking you find the time to do in a day.
low rise and mid rise are ugly as hell compared to densely packed high rise buildings or single family homes
Luckily each unit has a number that indicates the floor and each floor probably has a floormap near the elevator, so you won’t have to go knocking on random doors until you find the person.
Same thing for making deliveries in cities of several million. If there’s an effective addressing system, it’s usually trivial to find the destination, or at least to get very close to it and switch to “ok wtf is going on here with the last bit of this address?” mode.
We need this in North America if we ever want to solve the housing crisis tbh. I’m talking Soviet-style, grey concrete commieblocks. Yes the buildings are ugly, probably lack amenities, cheaply constructed and not well maintained, but we desperately need cheap, dense housing if we’re going to bring down the costs. Building more luxury Manhattan condos and suburban single family abominations does nothing to bring down housing prices.
We need mass housing, but also a focus on aesthetics.
I noticed my area has done a nice job after visiting Chicago. Chicago was concrete, roads and parking lots, and barren. Fly back to metro Vancouver and even worst neighborhood has beautitul construction, parks, trees and flower beds everywhere.Ok this is a soft rebuttal because I agree we need to fix affordability asap, but is intensification really the right path?
Like something else needs to be fixed or these super condos will just enable politicians to import even more people to maintain the unaffordability.
3-5 story housing with no parking works in France/Europe. No elevators/pools is huge cost savings. Room for cars ridiculously expensive where land is ridiculously expensive. Bikeable/walkable communities FTW. 5th story units would be cheaper, but young people need cheaper.
elevators are required for ada compliance
3 story houses/buildings exist without elevators. There is no proposal to outlaw ADA compliant buildings.
The percentage of poverty among people with disabilities is much higher than in the general population, so if you’re building for low-income you really need to make it accessible. Also there’s a lot of old folks who can walk, barely, but not climb stairs.
We need mass housing, but also a focus on aesthetics.
I noticed my area has done a nice job after visiting Chicago. Chicago was concrete, roads and parking lots, and barren. Fly back to metro Vancouver and even worst neighborhood has beautitul construction, parks, trees and flower beds everywhere.I mean I agree that Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but it’s also one of the most expensive! Even a bachelor apartment in the gnarliest blocks on the downtown east side is over $2k/mo.
Yeah I meant an hour out of Vancouver, Metro Vancouver… But still pricey
That’s how you create undesirable neighborhoods which eventually turn into ghettos. Many cities in Europe tried that and many of those neighborhoods quickly became unsafe and derelict. Like many of the banlieus in Paris or the Bijlmer in Amsterdam. Because people who eventually have the means to move out will leave asap. Nobody wants to settle in such a neighborhood. So only the poor and desperate stay. Which in turn means local business will leave as well.
I agree with the general mission of FuckCars, but it always seems full of people who don’t care about anything of what goes into a prosperous city that isn’t the amount of cars on the road.
Look at how Vienna works. Contrary to other places, they did government housing blocks really well there.
- The blocks are spread throughout the whole city. That means, there’s no really bad place where all the undesirables are concentrated. This mixes the population. For example, I went to a school in one of the inner districts. In my class we had fresh immigrants that could hardly speak German. We had kids from poor families. We had middle class kids. We had kids who’s parents were immigrants but who were born there. We had a kid who’s parents played in the Vienna Philharmonic. We had two really rich kids descending from former nobility. We had a kid who was the son of a well-known lawyer.
- The blocks do have an income limit when you get the flat, but that limit is very high (it easily covers everyone in the middle class) and it only applies when you move in. If your income increases afterwards you can still stay in that flat and still pay the same as anyone else. That means that you got a decent mix of people living in these blocks. There’s not only poor people there.
- Most of the blocks are actually really nice. There’s parks between the blocks with nice, old trees. Many of the blocks even have swimming pools or other special extras.
Check out for example this one here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterlaa
It can be done well. It doesn’t have to be crap.
The problem is that, for the property owning class, the unaffordability of homes is broadly a feature and not a bug.
I honestly think commieblocks don’t look that bad.
We don’t even necessarily need those, fucking row townhouses like old Chicago or New York would be a massive improvement in space usage and density alone. Just modify the design to have a garage in the back and make the alleyway larger. Hell you could narrow the front road if you do it right.
Hell you
couldshould narrow the front roadif you do it right.and turn it into a pedestrian plaza with a few shops and restaurants.While I like the enthusiasm we are still talking about the US here, even just for controlled semitruck or emergency service access it would still need to be wide enough for say a firetruck even compensation with utility alleyways and back end garages. But you could set it up to be relatively easily converted to such a thing if the required modifications to infrastructure and emergency services are done, but even then it’d be twenty years off even on a rapid timescale.
To be fair, I didn’t say make it impassible, I said narrow it. It’s easy enough to make a pedestrian plaza that a box truck or a firetruck can fit down. It works in the majority of the cities and towns in Scandinavia. They’re not going to build affordable rowhomes or high density housing in the states anytime soon so this is literally allll wishcasting from top to bottom.
Fair enough, though my point was moreso to do with how absurdly massive American fire engines and semi-trucks there are smaller tanks. A Stuart tank from WW2 or fuck even a M60 Patton are smaller than a standard American fire engine.
Cheap construction and poor maintainability is more expensive in the long run, I think it’s possible to create affordable housing while still having longevity and a reasonable access to amenities in mind.
Do you live in an apartment, a condo, a townhome, a home or…?
I live in a wildly overpriced studio apartment. I would jump at the chance to move into a concrete block apartment with no AC and limited hot water if it took $500 off my monthly rent.
if it took $500 off my monthly rent.
You think it would take $500 off your rent? Lol, they’re not going to make things cheaper, just life more miserable.
Wouldnt that just be supply and demand? Why would less comfortable housing not be less expensive?
If people want it, they’ll pay more. If they don’t, it will end up like the projects in Chicago.
Aren’t the projects subsidised housing? I would assume that most people living there would want out if they had a chance
How much do you currently pay and how much do you think these commie block apartments would cost? Because where I’m from, a 1br commie block apartment is as much as if not more than a modern studio apartment.
The lack of AC and poor ventilation really show in the summer too.
Apartment blocks are nice, but I don’t want to live in the commie ones, they suck in many ways.
What’s even the point of living if we have to live like packages sitting in a warehouse? Living for the sake of being alive sounds like torture.
So it’s Peachtree towers in MegaCity 1.
Judge Dredd approves.
Betcha the delivery guy delivers for one or more from many takeout food spots that are probably located inside the building itself.
