The last post underscored how to rent a kick-ass house in Shanghai to live in for an extended period of time. If I didn't make the point in the last post well enough I'll make it here: the process is frickin hard and one heck of a lot of work. It is something to be taken very seriously because of how easy it is to get saddled with a terrible house given all the potential junk that exists in the city for rent. Since the overall rental price in Shanghai is also VERY high, then you want to make sure that your big bucks are also paying for big quality. Sadly, there is no shortage of high-priced rental crap in Shanghai. If you translate that into what you could get outside the city (for example in Songjiang), you could be living in a king's palace.
In Wuhan, 1500 RMB a month gets you an awesome luxury dig in the Wanke compex, but 3000 RMB in downtown Shanghai might get you a one-bedroom cockroach-infested shoebox or else a tiny cramped little room where you share with roomates. The number of people who do roomates in downtown Shanghai is astonishing, not because they want to, but because they have to.
On the other hand, it's also tempting to move out towards the suburbs because the price goes down dramatically. For example, 3000 RMB in Songjiang will certainly get you a king's palace where the same place downtown will be upwards of 15,000 RMB a month, or else you pay the 3000 RMB downtown and ask if you want cockroaches with that too please
However, moving to the suburbs is a big disadvantage also. Even if you don't mind traveling, other people mind greatly, and you won't have any friends coming over. I have never lived in a city where people are so loathe to commute as in Shanghai, and I can't really blame them. Even 3km is considered very far away, and people won't make the trip. Two words: traffic jams. Even so, it still amazes me how lazy people are in this city and they will time their subway walks to the minute, not wanting to go anywhere beyond a 5 minute radius.
Then again, when you are facing population pressures such as this city does, getting around is simply unpleasant. For the sake of survival, you want to constrain everything to short distances and specific neighorhoods, and you certainly count how many minutes to reach the subway. Everybody does that. The happy medium I've reach is the midburbs. Far enough away from downtown to get good deals on rent where most people won't go this far, yet close enough that I don't burn out and can still convince friends to come over.
All this being said, I am very upset that the school does not take the housing situation as seriously as they should. When it comes to helping new teachers find places to live, they take a very lackadaisical approach, and most certainly not how a real Shanghainese local would do this if for themselves or their own family. The school also rips teachers off, both indirectly by using lazy agents, and also directly by overcharging and most likely collecting commission. The details are tricky on this, but the school does provide some sort of an allowance. Even so, it is nowhere near enough to match the Shanghai reality and the school selects houses in XU JIA HUI which is the most expensive in the city -- just because it is nearby. To give an example, the rents in XU JIA HUI are 8000 to 12,000 RMB a month, but the allowance is 4500 RMB a month.
They don't think of asking teachers if they wouldn't mind going a few more stops down the subway line, or crossing into Pudong on Line #7 for example, all of which would cut the prices by at least 50% as I've discovered. Sadly I've had to do most of this myself and get the information the hard way.
The overall gist of it is that housing is such a big deal in Shanghai, and especially for teachers, in order to be happy and comfortable in a place that is like an oasis or a haven, so to speak, in this madhouse of a city. If a teacher has a crappy house environment, then the job performance probably won't be good either. Conversely, happy home means happy job.
I'm also taking this house hunting rather seriously as I want to stay here for awhile and have also considered marrying and having a family here. In this sense, it would make things easier to already have a decent house lined up. Half-joking here. Well I like a quiet house and one that is conveniently situated for a good price, not just for myself, but as it makes it great to invite people over. Such as, for example, on Couchsurfing. A quiet house in some obscure suburban compound wouldn't exactly work for Couchsurfing.
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