Soaring property prices in China create "rat race" of subterranean poor Zig-zagging left and right through a maze of dark, narrow corridors in the basement of a high-rise, 35-year-old kitchen worker Mr. Hu has joined the many thousands of Chinese fleeing rising property prices by heading underground. Mr. Hu lives here, beneath a luxurious downtown apartment building, in a windowless, 43-square-foot apartment with his wife. For the equivalent of $70 a month, there's no air conditioning, the only suggestion of heat is a pipe snaking through to deliver gas to the apartments above, and the bathroom is a fetid, shared toilet down the hall. "I can't afford to rent a house," said Mr. Hu as he showed off his meagre appointments. Living in basement apartments isn't illegal in China, but like anywhere else it is nothing to brag about. Mr. Hu, who guts fish for $440 a month at a hot pot restaurant on the street above, declined to provide his given name. Locals have dubbed Mr. Hu and his fellow subterranean denizens the "rat race" - casualties and simultaneously emblems of a housing market beyond the government's control. Despite efforts to develop affordable housing and discourage property speculation, a steady stream of job seekers from the countryside and a lack of attractive investment alternatives have kept prices soaring. Residential property prices rose 10 per cent in November from the same month a year earlier, according to data released last week, and have been setting new records every year since 2009. That's pushing more and more newly arrived urbanites underground. Of the estimated 7.7 million migrants living in Beijing, nearly a fifth live either at their workplace or underground, according to state news agency Xinhua. Beijing's housing authority refuted this statistic, saying in an e-mail to Reuters that a government survey last year found only about 280,000 migrants living in basements and that only a small percentage of Beijing's basements were being used as dwellings. Last month, authorities sealed Beijing's manhole covers after local media discovered a group of people living in the sewers below - with one, a 52-year-old car washer, reported to have been living there for at least a decade. The sewer dwellers were relocated, and those who were not from Beijing were sent back home. Surging residential prices are both boon and bane to the government. China's booming property sector accounts for roughly 15 per cent of GDP, and heavily indebted local governments rely on land sales - selling land earns them roughly three times what they collect in taxes. But rising prices are putting home ownership further out of reach for most Chinese, worsening the gap between rich and poor and breeding social discontent. "Some people can buy several homes, some people can't even buy one," said Mao Yushi, co-founder and honorary president of the Unirule Institute of Economics, an independent think tank in Beijing. There will be an impact on society. The government has responded by restricting home purchases and boosting the supply of low-cost public housing. In Beijing, the total floor space of public housing rose 20 per cent in the first 11 months of 2013 from the year before. But with the promise of employment and education beckoning in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the problem appears likely to only get worse. Beijing saw another 316,000 migrants arrive in 2012, lifting its population to 19.6 million. Not surprisingly, public-opinion polls routinely rank rising home prices as one of the biggest sources of anxiety among Chinese adults. Chinese have invented the term "housing slave" to describe those struggling to make hefty monthly mortgages payments. But with Beijing home prices having risen six-fold in the past decade, even cheap public housing can be beyond the reach of many, forcing them to seek less attractive alternatives. In a basement below a block of apartments in downtown Beijing, residents walk stooped to avoid pipes hanging from the ceilings. "This is better than other basements in the area," said one 26-year-old resident. The typical basement or workplace apartment is less than five-square-metres, according to Xinhua, less than a tenth the size of the typical Beijing apartment. Fires sometimes break out in basements when people cook. Apartments are so small that Mr. Hu said he and his wife have trouble sleeping together in their tiny bed. He has resorted to spending most nights in another basement apartment provided by his restaurant. His wife yearns for a larger home above ground and in the meantime makes do by decorating the room with plastic bells and flowers that Mr. Hu says she finds in the street. Their dream of owning a home remains distant, and Mr. Hu says basement living has hurt their relationship. "It's too difficult to have a house right now," he said. Every basement has people living in it. See for yourself. There are so many of us out there.