Featured Image Credit: MetaRoid/YouTube / fatheristheone/TikTok
If you're ever wondering what the future of housing might look like, take a look at a megabuilding in Hangzhou, China.
It's called the Regent International - it's a simply enormous block of flats shaped like a sort of wave, which hosts a crazy 20,000 residents, and astonishingly has room for 10,000 more.
Last year a TikTok video went viral showcasing drone footage of the building's exterior, giving a bit of a sense of its sheer scale with so many balconies to take in, all of them housing some little detail of their own.
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Even watching that drone footage, though, it's still a little hard to get your head around the idea that there are 20,000 people living inside.
Since it supports so many residents, the building complex is more universal than you might think. In fact, it has enough amenities that you could live there for years without technically ever needing to leave.
There's a supermarket for groceries, a swimming pool, hairdressers and more, making it something like a vertical town in some ways. Whether that sounds like a dream scenario or a bit of a nightmare to you is probably down to personal taste.
The apartments are also pretty affordable, albeit small, and are reportedly mostly occupied by single young workers and students, aiming to get their start in life.
It apparently also houses a lot of people who've moved to Hangzhou in search of work, perhaps from more rural areas.
You can apparently get a one-bed apartment for as little as $210 a month, although many of these don't have windows, which could be an issue if you like your natural light (as most of us do).
Even a bigger apartment with a balcony, like the ones you can see in the drone video, could set you back more like $570 each month, so it's positively affordable by US standards.
The building was apparently designed to be a luxury hotel in the first place, before being repurposed as a huge residential block, which might go some way to explaining why it looks so interesting despite its simple purpose.
It was designed, in fact, by Alicia Loo, who is well-known in architecture for designing the Singapore Sands Hotel, a ridiculously lavish seven-star hotel in Singapore.
