Beijing’s Mousetribe: affordable housing in Mao’s underground air-raid bunkers
Beijing’s Mousetribe: affordable housing in Mao’s underground air-raid bunkers; 30% of Beijing’s underground air raid bunkers have been converted into rental dormitories
I’m descending into a Mao era underground air-raid bunker in Beijing. This bunker has been converted into tiny rental dormitories with no windows and little fresh air. My two guides seem anxious and they talk nervously to each other with low voices, and in Mandarin.
We walk down two flights of grey stairs that scream of communist era aesthetics. It’s dark and damp, and at the bottom is a round steel door. It’s painted green with two steel bars for handles. These, I’m told later, were for locking the airtight door shut in the event of a nuclear attack.
As we reach the steel door the landlord catches sight of us. The air begins to tremble. I feel a cold chill rush cross my skin. The landlord is clearly agitated. My guides have been here before, and they ask if we can speak to the tenants, the people they call the Mousetribe.
The conversation intensifies and the landlord begins to yell. He refuses to let us in. We decide to leave the basement dormitories.
Back above ground my two guides tell me about a flash flood that hit the city in 2012. 55,000 people were evacuated and over 8000 homes were destroyed or damaged. During the flood thousands of poor rural-to-urban migrant workers flowed onto the streets from the bunkers – their underground homes.
The floods exposed an invisible subterranean population known as the Mousetribe, an underground city of up to a million people.
With 20 million people and a housing affordability crisis, up to 30 per cent of Beijing’s underground air raid bunkers have been converted into rental dormitories. Many are often just a few square metres in size.
Associate Professor Huang Youqin, from the University of Albany in the United States reports, “the rent for a modest one bedroom apartment of 60 square metres in [Dongchen District and Xicheng Districts] ranged from 2700 to 4500 yuan/month ($595 to $992). In comparison, rents for basement dormitories of 8 square metres in these communities are about 400 to 800 yuan/month ($88 to $176)”.
I didn’t set out to find Beijing’s Mousetribe. I’m an urban researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. I travelled to Singapore, Hong Kong and Mainland China in 2014 to interview foreign real estate investors and foreign sales agents for a study on Chinese investment in Australian real estate.
I’m interested in the relationship between housing poverty and wealth in global cities. I’ve interviewed a lot of people about their housing experiences, from low-income public housing tenants in South Chicago to super-rich real estate investors in Singapore.
Researching the economic extremities of housing, from the super-rich to the extremely poor, brings into focus an often-ignored historical dimension to housing research. And this is how I found the Mousetribe.
If you think Australia has a housing affordability problem, you should hear about the plight of the Mousetribe in the Confucian City.
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