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- Residents are living in 4-by-6 units and sleeping in McDonald's restaurants as a result of the housing crisis.
Housing costs are so high in Hong Kong that residents are thinking about moving in with ghosts.
Bloomberg reports that more than half the 1,001 respondents in an REA Group Ltd. study said they would consider buying a haunted home to save money.
The findings are particularly impactful when considering that, in Hong Kong, living in a haunted house is considered taboo. Homes in Hong Kong that have been the sites of suicides, murders, or accidental deaths are considered haunted. These homes can be priced as much as 20% lower than other homes in the area, according to Bloomberg.Read more: Inside the most expensive neighborhood in the world's most expensive city
The housing situation in Hong Kong is an ongoing crisis. In 2017, Business Insider reported that over 200,000 people live in 20-foot "coffin homes" where the starting rent is around $180 a month. These 4-by-6 homes are stacked on top of each other in apartment buildings with ladders in the halls to help residents get to upper-level units.
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But that's not all people are doing to avoid high rents -as Business Insider previously reported, some of Hong Kong's homeless residents, dubbed McRefugees, have resorted to calling 24-hour fast-food restaurants home.
Earlier this year, Hong Kong was named the most unaffordable city in the world for the ninth year in a row. About one in five people live below the poverty line. The wealth gap is so extreme that overlooking the streets where locals are sleeping in restaurants sits the most expensive neighborhood in the city - The Peak. Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire who founded Alibaba, is said to have purchased a $191 million mansion in the neighborhood in 2015.