Village skyscraper exposes extortionate costs of regular housing
- Source: Global Times
- [23:29 July 29 2010]
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By Li Lingqun
Is it now trendy to put up tall buildings in the countryside?
I wondered this when I first saw a picture of the new 23-story high-rise in the village of Beishanmen in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province.
Most people would imagine houses in the countryside are low-rise ones. Unlike overcrowded cities, there is no need for skyscrapers to accommodate the relatively sparse population in the countryside.
However, the world is never organized in black and white. China's rapid urbanization has produced many "grey areas" where the choice between low-rise and high-rise is not so clear-cut.
Beishanmen, like many other villages, is gradually being swallowed up by the outskirts of Xi'an, but this 23-story building, voted "the most awesome village housing in history" by Chinese netizens, is located among many low-rise housing complexes.
Scheduled to be completed in a month, it has all exterior windows in place and the red tiles put up. "The first eight floors contain four apartments, and three each above that," a worker on site said, "and there are over 70 suites." He contin-ued, "Various floor plans are included to cope with different needs; the top level has been taken by Hu Mengru."
Hu Mengru, a Beishanmen village head and the founding father of this controversy-inciting giant, said his plan was intended to relieve the tension in his village between the high demand for living space and a limited number of homes.
The 23-story building is remarkably cheap. It's estimated that 5 million yuan ($737,469) was spent on construction.
In comparison, look at the apartment compound in Nanjing where I used to live. Most buildings in this community were built in 1999.
The current price per square meter ranges between 13,000 and 18,000 yuan ($2,655). Given this, the average value of a seven-story, 10-year-old building covering 250 square meters totals 27 million yuan ($3.98 million) per floor, enough to build the entire 23-story building in Beishanmen five times in 2010!
So the breathtaking prices of recent housing developing seem rather hard to grasp.
How much money are these developers making?
