Beijing's One Million Underground Urban Dwellers

Annette M. Kim, associate professor at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, reports on the market and policy conditions that drove so many residents to live underground.

According to the abstract for the article, "an estimated one million people are living in subterranean apartments in Beijing, where affordable housing near employment is scarce for the greater city’s 23 million inhabitants (Xing 2011). These units are often windowless subdivisions in basements and air raid shelters, and the median size is 9.75 square meters." 

The city's subterranean spaces result "from a policy dating to 1950 that requires all new buildings to have common basements and air defense shelters. Construction codes specify building guidelines, including the provision of infrastructure such as electricity, water, and sewers. This supply of underground space has grown exponentially amid China’s extraordinary building boom in recent decades. Some complexes contain as many as 600 units below street level."

The article provides analysis of the underground market, the housing policy that enabled, and then reacted to, the underground conditions, and recommendations for making rental housing affordable in Beijing.