Chapter 121: The Housing Shortage

Sunlight streamed through the crudely made blinds, casting a clear light on Yang Yun’s face and the糾結 (tangled/conflicted) expression upon it.

Yang Yun was currently looking at the report in his hand. His eyebrows were twisted into a pretzel, then they gradually loosened, only to twist again into a cruller.

Beside him, Dai Xiu, an intern from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, stood with her head bowed and waist bent in a gesture of utmost respect.

Dai Xiu was a native of Lingao. The Dai family’s ancestors were once considered a scholarly family, but by her father Dai Degao’s generation, they had long since abandoned literary pursuits and lived by tilling their ancestral lands.

When the Australian short-haired people suddenly landed, after the initial fright, Dai Degao made a good profit by selling grain and vegetables to the Chiefs. Then, an idea struck him, and he sent his unmarried second daughter, Dai Xiu, to the National School.

According to the aesthetic standards of the Ming Dynasty, Dai Xiu was considered tall and difficult to marry off. But from his contact with the Chiefs, Dai Degao knew that this group of “short-haired people” preferred tall women and disliked those who were thin and petite. Especially after the Liu family’s daughter married Chief Xun, he had been tempted to see if any of the Chiefs would take a fancy to his daughter. Unfortunately, Dai Xiu’s looks were plain, and the management at Fangcao was strict, giving her very few opportunities for private contact with the male Chiefs.

After obtaining a B-level diploma, Dai Xiu, being over fifteen years old and with unremarkable grades, could not continue to high primary school. Because she was a self-funded student, her future was not controlled by the civil affairs department. She was free to choose her own profession. Dai Degao told her to go home, preparing to find a good family to marry her off to and get a good betrothal gift. But Dai Xiu no longer wanted to go home and get married early. She made her own decision and signed up to be an intern in the administrative department. Dai Degao was originally unwilling, but he also knew how determined the Yuanlao were in carrying out their will, so he had to let her be. Even if he couldn’t get a betrothal gift for a while, she could at least support herself and bring some money home.

After passing the political screening, she was assigned to the civil affairs department. She worked in the compound during the day, and in the evening, Chiefs from the Ministry of Civil Affairs took turns giving them special night training. This way, she had no worries about food and clothing, had a small income, and could live in the staff dormitory without having to go back.

At this moment, Dai Xiu was not afraid of the “King of Hell” face opposite her. Although Chief Yang would occasionally make lewd jokes, he was mostly easy to talk to.

Her eyes glanced at Chief Yang’s brand-new shirt. The snow-white, upright collar looked very dashing. In her mind, she was calculating how much more she needed to save in circulation coupons to get the new pink shirt she had been coveting at the East Gate Market.

The Chiefs were very capable. Not only was the workmanship of the shirt good and the color beautiful, but the collar was also very crisp, making one look particularly dashing when wearing it. She had been envious ever since a female roommate who worked and studied part-time with her wore one. Although everyone said that pink faded easily, she still wanted to buy one for herself.

“Xiao Xiu, come with me to Maniao.”

The numbers in the report were making Yang Yun’s original worries turn into reality. He planned to go to the newly built residential area in Maniao to have a look.

Although he had sent his apprentice to the Maniao New District construction site and received daily progress reports, it was still not as reassuring as seeing it for himself. There wasn’t much to do today, so it was a good time to go over.

Dai Xiu agreed, packed the document bag, and handed it over. Without any hesitation, she reached out her small hand and, as taught in the school’s etiquette class, began to tidy the Chief’s clothes.

The winter sun shone through the blinds, casting a glow on Dai Xiu’s face and adding a bit of radiance to her ordinary features. Her previously flat figure had developed some slight curves after more than two years of nourishment from the National School’s meals.

Yang Yun’s throat moved. He had long been aware of the little thoughts of the girl in front of him. Some male Yuanlao, either openly or secretly, actively or passively, had already gotten involved with these intern girls. After all, although most of these girls had plain looks, they were basically from wealthy local families, which was a very different temperament from the life secretaries who were mostly from peasant backgrounds. After being molded by the National School, as a diversion from a busy life, as long as one had no moral objections to these girls who were still half-loli, taking them down was a pleasure that only a few men in the old world could enjoy.

A wicked smile appeared on his face. Yang Yun’s gaze began to wander shamelessly, from the delicate collarbone before him to the crimson little mouth. Seeing the two small, shy clouds of red appear on Dai Xiu’s cheeks, his mood improved considerably. His life secretary had been pregnant for some time. To push this little girl down with the door closed in this office… the thought was quite exciting.

Leaving the administrative building, Yang Yun suppressed his desire and walked towards the city gate with Dai Xiu, whose face was gradually calming down. His mind began to calculate again.

He was not confident that the residential project in Maniao New District could be completed smoothly. The construction was being handled by a newly formed branch of the Civil Construction Company, with only Zhang Xingpei, a Yuanlao, as a lone commander. The other technical experts were all newly trained in the past two years. Due to the weak technical force, although the designs were all mature, the progress was slow and accidents were frequent. A few days ago, there had even been a fatality.

After returning from Qiongshan, Yang Yun had been busy with the resettlement of new immigrants. The original plan was to immigrate from populous counties like Qiongshan, which was a long-term job. But after the typhoon disaster in the summer, a year’s immigration plan was completed ahead of schedule.

The problem was that this was followed by a large number of immigrants from the Engine Operation. These immigrants, in the tens of thousands, had to be resettled in various places, and the housing pressure suddenly became very great—especially in Lingao, the main county for population resettlement, where the pressure was particularly huge.

Although temporary resettlement was still manageable, how to accommodate so many people in the already tight housing situation had been worrying Yang Yun recently.

Right now, most of the Yuanlao were enthusiastically invested in the Engine Plan. That was a major event in the Yuanlao’s progress. These small troubles in front of them were naturally not in their eyes.

The urbanization rate of Lingao in the 17th century was very low. Neither the county town nor the various villages had many spare houses for rent. Although after a large influx of outside population, housing prices and rents had skyrocketed, and many Lingao people had begun to build various types of housing on their own land, due to limitations in manpower and technology, the newly built houses were still far from meeting the demand.

As far as he knew, for many immigrants who had flocked in from other places but had not entered the Lingao system for various reasons, housing was a major pressure in their lives.

However, for the time being, he couldn’t attend to that. Housing was a stabilizer of public morale, so at this stage, solving the contradiction between supply and demand of housing for the naturalized citizens within the Lingao system was the focus of Yang Yun’s work.

When the industrial zone began to be built, in order to reflect the beauty of the new life, the standard workers’ housing was originally designed as all apartment buildings. But the construction department soon learned the gap between reality and ability, which could not be bridged by enthusiasm.

So, before long, the apartment buildings were upgraded to cadre housing. Fortunately, the first batch of naturalized citizens who followed them could at least reach the level of a clerk, and even the workers had become senior veterans, so there were no major problems in this regard.

But the new immigrants who subsequently poured into the Lingao industrial zone could only live in housing that was slightly better than the sheds in the quarantine area.

In order to be able to build on a large scale adapted to Lingao’s technical level, and with reference to the industrial zone planning of the early days of the People’s Republic of China, the construction department copied the “1950 Civil Building Design Reference” and divided Lingao’s civil buildings into two categories: dormitories and residences.

The dormitory was a simple bungalow designed for a ten-year use period, with a uniform north-south orientation, using bricks and tiles as the main building materials. To save cement and construction time, the interior and exterior walls were not plastered.

This type of dormitory had a per capita building area of 3.5 square meters, including living and common areas. Each room housed ten people, with ten bungalows connected into one building, and eight buildings forming a district. There were public toilets, bathhouses, and canteens. Each district could accommodate eight hundred people. Currently, there were more than thirty dormitory districts, accommodating more than twenty thousand people.

The rent for the dormitories was much less than the monthly installments for the apartment buildings. For a long time, most of the new immigrants in Lingao were single, and they were quite satisfied with this cheap and hygienic accommodation. Besides, there were still residences to buy in the future.

The situation with residences was much more complicated. Initially, apart from the Yuanlao residential area, which had complete modern apartment buildings, some bamboo-reinforced buildings were also built on the periphery of the Bairen City industrial zone. However, bamboo reinforcement was not safe enough. It was acceptable for irrigation canals, but large-scale promotion was a time bomb. Later, it was basically no longer used in civil buildings and was replaced by steel reinforcement.

This type of building copied the family dormitories of state-owned enterprises in the southern regions in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a three-story south-facing corridor-style building with multiple households per staircase. To simplify the design and construction difficulty, there were only two types of units: a one-and-a-half-room unit with a building area of thirty square meters, and a three-room unit with a building area of sixty square meters, with its own kitchen, and separate public toilets and bathrooms. There were ten households per floor, and each building had a building area of 1,260 square meters.

After a few buildings were completed, it was found that the apartment buildings were too labor-intensive and consumed too much steel and cement, which was a bit overwhelming. Even in the original world’s Lingao, from 1970 to 1978, the housing construction area in nine years was only 197,900 square meters, of which only 43,000 square meters were apartment buildings, which was less than 5,000 square meters per year.

Although the construction department worked tirelessly, almost all year round except for a few days during typhoons and festivals, with 24-hour construction, and the construction workers worked day and night, with help from the industrial department, the army, and various villages, due to the priority given to infrastructure, industrial, and public buildings, the dormitories were completed with 90,000 square meters in more than two years, but the total number of residences was only twenty buildings with more than 20,000 square meters, which was only six hundred units.

After the Battle of Chengmai, the situation in Lingao became increasingly stable. The social economy has developed rapidly in recent years, and the scale of employment has continued to expand. In terms of income, not to mention cadres, even workers were much higher than local farmers. Many workers who had connections in neighboring counties or across the strait had asked people to arrange marriages for them back home. Currently, the number of new small families added each month exceeded one hundred. Including the workers and cadres who had moved their entire families from other places and were waiting to buy a house, there were more than two thousand households waiting to buy a house, which alone would require more than sixty apartment buildings, not to mention future additions.