Although the Bu Peien Area was rated every year as the least suitable place for ordinary people to live, large numbers of ordinary people still struggled to survive there.
They lived in the parts of the city with the poorest public facilities. Some places did not even have phone booths--
They had once had them, but later, some young street toughs broke the coin-operated phones.
They wanted the coins inside, but they did not have keys. They did have hammers and other tools, though.
They thought that after they destroyed the phone booths, the Bu Peien Telegraph Office and the communications company would reinstall the phones. Instead, those neighborhoods had already been blacklisted.
Not only did they stop installing new phones, they even hauled away the phone booths!
Everyone living there was poor, and the hardships of life made them especially irritable.
As the city with the highest cost of living in the Federation, Bu Peien was no place where supporting a family was easy!
They refused to leave for cities with better living conditions because they believed that one day their perseverance would bring them enormous returns! For example...demolition and reconstruction when the urban area expanded.
Once those dilapidated neighborhoods were included in a redevelopment zone, demolition would bring every household extremely generous compensation! After all, some places called Lower Districts were not actually very far from the city center. They were right on its outskirts.
Once the city expanded, the land there would be worth its weight in gold! For that reason, many people endured the hardships of living there and continued to hold on.
John was one of them. He lived with his family in a sixty-five-square-meter apartment.
He owned the property.
He had a very ordinary job and earned $416.75 a month. That looked considerably higher