Living in Cages
Photo: Vincent Yu/AP
If you think your house is small, consider this: for some of the poorest people in Hong Kong - one of Asia's wealthiest cities - a home is a 16-square feet metal cage.
The 67-year-old former butcher pays 1,300 Hong Kong dollars ($167) a month for one of about a dozen wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment in a gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood.
The cages, stacked on top of each other, measure 1.5 square meters (16 square feet). To keep bedbugs away, Leung and his roommates put thin pads, bamboo mats, even old linoleum on their cages' wooden planks instead of mattresses.
