[KMag]

My 350 square foot studio in a luxury building in Hong Kong served my wife and I fine for the first year of our marriage. (A last minute opportunity came up for her to join me a year earlier than expected, and the brand new luxury tower next door flooded the market and made it difficult to find someone to take over my lease.)

The two of us now live in a 700 square foot 4 BR, where we use one BR as a walk-in closet and another as a study. Our landlord claims 13 family members lived in this unit when he was a kid.

[refurb]

700 sq ft and four bedrooms? I’m in a 700 sq ft two bed/two bath and the 2nd bedroom is tiny. I couldn’t imagine how small they must be to to get four of them.

[nicolas_t]

Typically in Hong Kong, Bedrooms for those kind of apartments are roughly 40-50 square feet. You can put a bed and a night stand and that's it.

Also a lot of 700 sq ft apartment with 3-4 bedrooms have 2 bathrooms which further reduces the total available space. It's quite common for a family of 5-6 (2 kids, parents plus grand parents) + 1 live-in helper to live in such an apartment. The live-in helper usually gets a windowless closet for her room (so around 21 sq ft) that's next to the kitchen (I have a hard time with the kind of living conditions offered to helpers but I guess it's really a shitty situation in terms of space for everyone). This is the living situation of a middle class family able to afford a 4,500 usd/month apartment and a 700 usd/month live-in helper (there's no daycare available in hk which is why a lot end up getting a live-in helper after having kids).

With covid, schools have been closed and people had to work from home making things much harder.