SHANGHAI — Early one recent Friday morning, government agents dressed in military fatigues and lugging sledgehammers stormed into one apartment after another at a huge housing complex here. They smashed walls and tossed tenants' belongings outside. Frightened occupants fled.
These weren't drug houses or prostitution dens. The targets of raids were "collective rentals": apartments divided into tiny rooms and crammed with 10 or more tenants, many of them migrant workers.
"All of a sudden, we've become pests of society," said one resident driven onto the streets.
The raid last month at Twin River Bay apartments in northwest Shanghai shows how tensions have risen as landlords, residents and governments grapple with a severe housing crunch in Chinese cities.
Soaring home prices and rents have put ordinary housing out of reach for many workers. New apartments are going up, but often they're snapped up by investors from out of town, creating legions of absentee owners. Meanwhile, young people from the countryside continue to flood into cities.
Of Shanghai's 20 million residents, 2 million to 3 million are thought to be part of the city's "floating population." There may be jobs for them, but where to live is another matter.
Affordable housing -- a perennial issue in large U.S. cities such as Los Angeles -- has become one of the toughest challenges for China's central government as it gears up for the Communist Party Congress in mid-October, held every five years.
President Hu Jintao, who is expected to solidify his power at the meeting, has built his platform on the motto of harmonious society. But harmony is in short supply in communities such as Twin River Bay.
The government has ordered construction of more low-rent, subsidized housing nationwide, but for the most part, the Communist Party apparatus, which once allotted housing to workers, has taken a hands-off approach to the problem.
The free-market solution has been collective rentals. In typical Chinese entrepreneurial fashion, a cottage industry has sprung up around the practice.
Until the raid, Ge Yiwei, 18, and his older sister managed half a dozen such apartments at Twin River Bay. In most cases, he said, property owners couldn't find families who would pay $300 to $350 a month for their two-bedroom units. So the owners turned over the keys to a collective rental business.
