[majormajor]

In 2014 I worked with a company in Beijing for a few weeks. The local engineers all had pretty long and packed subway commutes from various outer developments, so my first guess would be that "affordable housing in the city center" is long gone for most major cities.

The surface-level infrastructure was interesting, it felt like Los Angeles - much more than it did Manhattan or SF aboveground - just blown up 3-to-5x. Wider streets with more lanes of cars, big mega apartment complexes just all four times taller than the common 5-story ones, etc.

[livueta]

+1, at least anecdotally, at least in T1 cities: I spent a few months in Shanghai for work in 2018 and all of my local colleagues had messed up housing situations of one flavor or another. One guy lived alone in a shoebox but when he had a free weekend, he'd take the train ~2h out to a smaller city where his family lived in a decent house. There were also a lot of complaints about apartment quality even/especially in new construction.

The drive from central-ish Shanghai (Wujiaochang) to PVG was mindblowing because of the scale and frequency of the apartment megablocks ringing the city: identical enormous tower after identical enormous tower, lining the wide (but at the time oddly empty) thoroughfares. Felt like an alt opening scene to a Judge Dredd movie.

[majormajor]

With the folks I was working with it wasn't "messed up" in any way, it just was hardly any more relatively affordable give local wages than most big cities in the US.

Some fun/awkward differences though. For instance, I had imagined it would be easy to find a laundromat - I didn't want to pay the hotel prices for cleaning. Ended up almost accidentally offending the people I was asking - "why would we need to go somewhere to do our laundry, we have laundry machines, we aren't poor" - while since a lot of US cities are older in the dense parts of town, laundry machines in-unit were less common even for sometimes pretty pricey places.

One of my big takeaways is that development is a lot easier and cheaper than redevelopment. Building a ton of new housing? Put in today's amenities! It might be crappy quality even in "luxury" new construction (whether here or there) but it's gonna be a lot easier than retrofitting into a bunch of units from 50 years ago. Want a QR-code/app-based payment system to take off? It's gonna be easier if you're one of the first widespread options to replace cash (like in China at the time) vs if you're competing with ubiquitous credit/debit cards in the US. Really illustrative of how things are path-dependent - and why I'm bearish on "super apps" replacing what we already have here.

[nonethewiser]

I used to think that way about WeChat but I don’t anymore. The reason stores use credit payment networks in the West is because it’s better. We have cash transferring apps but we don’t use them for a reason. Meanwhile, China does not have the same type of payment networks.

[oboes]

> The reason stores use credit payment networks in the West is because it’s better. We have cash transferring apps but we don’t use them for a reason.

In many (most?) European countries, debit cards and cash transfering apps are more common than credit-based payments. I have a credit card but I don't use it often (mostly for some online transactions, such as buying plane tickets), and many people only have a debit card.

[livueta]

Sorry, too colloquial: "messed up" == unusually high rent-to-income ratios comparable to expensive Western cities, resulting in the same sorts of compromises and dissatisfaction found in those circumstances - basically what you said.

[akomtu]

"identical enormous tower after identical enormous tower"

That's the drukkhar architecture (we'll get to hear this word more often in the future). They are only missing giant grey flat-top pyramids: jusy as cold, efficient and brutalistic.

[majormajor]

The same thing is common in the US, it's just "a complex of ten identical four story apartment buildings" or "an HOA development of nothing but three distinct similar house plans over and over and over again all the same color."

It's efficiency (fewer variants to make) + risk-minimization (design as a way of offending as few as possible for $$$ maximization instead of a way of expressing something).

[nomay]

The reality is someone have pay for those beautiful infrastructure, not going to be the incumbents due to political arrangment, then it’s the vulnerable newcomers shouldering all of it. Just think about those terrifying condo prices.