If you have to ask, you can't afford it

That has made housing in Beijing more expensive relative to average incomes than in many developed countries. The median price for residential property in Beijing is over $4,500 a square meter, according to property developer Soufun, with rents running at $9.50 per square meter - in a nation where the average annual income is just over $6,000.

That makes Beijing homes almost three times as expensive for Chinese as buying a home in New York City is for Americans, according to Reuters calculations based on data from the World Bank and San Francisco-based property website Trulia. Renting a 1,000 square-foot apartment in China's capital would cost almost double the average citizen's monthly income.

Not surprisingly, public opinion polls routinely rank rising home prices as one of the biggest sources of anxiety among Chinese adults. A 2012 survey by the Hong Kong media website Phoenix found that couples in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen spend on average 42 percent of their combined monthly income on mortgages. 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, according to Soufun, 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 5 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 - at least three were reported in Beijing last year.

Apartments are so small that 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 Hu says she finds in the street. Their dream of owning a home remains distant and Hu says basement living has hurt their relationship.

"It's too difficult to have a house right now," said Hu. "Every basement has people living in it. See for yourself. There are so many of us out there."

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