In Hong Kong, Burdened Renters Live in Illegal ‘Coffin Cubicles’

The rent in Hong Kong is high--so astronomical in fact that almost 200,000 of it's residents live in illegally subdivided apartments because they've been pushed out of the market. The 15-square-foot wood-planked "rooms" are known as "coffin cubicles", says Sarah Stacke for National Geographic. Some of them can be as small as 15 square feet, and most are not larger than 100 square feet. Stacke says almost 40,000 of those living in coffin cubicles are children.

With a population of nearly 7.5 million and almost no developable land remaining, Hong Kong’s housing market has risen to the most expensive in the world. Pushed out by soaring rents, tens of thousands of people have no other option than to inhabit squatter huts, sub-divided units where the kitchen and toilet merge, coffin cubicles, and cage homes, which are rooms measuring as small as 6’ x 2.5’ traditionally made of wire mesh. “From cooking to sleeping, all activities take place in these tiny spaces,” says Lam. To create the coffin cubicles a 400 square flat will be illegally divided by its owner to accommodate 20 double-decker beds, each costing about HK$2000 (over $250 USD) per month in rent. The space is too small to stand up in.

A photographer visited over 100 of Hong Kong's coffin cubicle dwellings and shared the images with National Geogrpahic. Continue to their site to see what life inside a coffin cubicle is like.