You'll Never Complain About Your Tiny Apartment Again

You’ll never whine about your fifth floor walk-up again. Or, you will, but now with a bit more perspective, hopefully.

From the Society for Community Organization, a Hong Kong-based human rights organization dedicated to improving the lives of the “1.3 million Hong Kong people who live below the poverty line – predominantly comprising the cage and cubicle dwellers, the single elderly, new immigrant women, children living in poverty, street-sleepers, people with mental illnesses, low-paid workers, refugees and ethnic minorities.” — comes a new ad campaign that asks HK residents to petition their local government to address unsafe living conditions. According to government statistics from 2009, there are nearly 100,000 people in Hong Kong — many of them elderly, women, and children — who live in cage homes, cubicles, or small partitioned flats.

According to Copyranter, when The Economist named Hong Hong the world’s most livable city, the already astronomical real estate prices soared. Landlords are now chopping up already tiny apartments into literal postage stamps. OK, not literal, but pretty damn close.

These pictures from photographer Benny Lam are of real homes, and I want to formally apologize for every time I complained about anything related to my housing situation ever.

Of course, there are millions of people living below the poverty line in the United States (46.2 million, to be precise), and barely surviving in seemingly impossible situations. However, the scarcity of space in Hong Kong makes it easier to capture the problem in a single photo. Powerful stuff.