Blog Post Title Three

HK Social Issues Series: “Cage Homes”

Walk through the right alley in Mong Kok or Sham Shui Po and you’ll find them. Old buildings or “Tong Lau”, often with under 10 floors and no lifts with seemingly endless flights of stairs. Laundry dripping from windows, the air thick with the smell of oil and dust. Inside, behind rusted gates and flickering hall lights, are the cage homes. They’re not easy to describe to someone who hasn’t seen them. Imagine a room split into metal compartments. Not rooms. Cages. Stacked on top of each other like shelving units. Some with curtains, some without. Just enough space to lie down. A fan if you're lucky. People live entire lives in these boxes. There’s a man who’s been there for 12 years. Works kitchen shifts six days a week. Keeps an old clock radio at the foot of his bed. Still irons his shirts, folds them sharp. A woman nearby boils soup every Sunday—same recipe, same plastic bowl, same quiet ritual. Doing all of this whilst in the same room day by day as strangers. They make do, because there’s no other choice. And the thing is, these spaces aren’t just small. They’re forgotten. You don’t see them in real estate ads or tourism campaigns. You see them in fires that make the news for a day or in blurry phone footage when someone finally complains to a district councilor. They exist in the cracks between what’s legal and what’s livable. But they tell you something. They tell you how space is handed out in a city that’s long run out of it. They tell you who gets to rest in comfort, and who gets by on corners and curtain rods.