0-10% of the U.S. "lives in slums"? lol, okay
20-30% of China "lives in slums"? yeah, right
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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Too low res to see if 
is green.
The map has no data it's just colors and percentages lol
I thought that was a joke until I saw the text
sorry I just cropped it out (not intentionally) but it's % of urban population living in "slums"
I opened the post assuming there wasn’t going to be any explanation of what the scale means. I’m not sure whether to be pleasantly surprised or disappointed.
I recognise the style as being from Our World In Data, so I searched for them and found it. They use data from the UN which uses this definition:
A slum household is defined as a group of individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living area, durability of housing, and security of tenure.
"Security of tenure" is probably where China's hukou system messes things up.
There's also a "complementary" category of "inadequate housing", which is defined by households spending 30% or more of their income on housing. This isn't part of the definition of slums, which is probably why the US and such appear so low. But keep also in mind that 0-10% can still mean up to 1 in 10 households.
The data sources are a mixture of national statistical agencies and the UN's own.
security of tenure.
Like 90% of American rentals allow the landlord to evict you whenever for basically any reason.
This depends a massive amount on the definition of a slum, because there is certainly a big proportion of the Chinese population that lives in lower-quality housing (not like shantytown-level usually, just lower-quality) but they are overwhelmingly in villages, etc., while "slum" normally implies denser urban populations. If they are using a culturally reasonable definition of slum, then it is a lie.
Also, our chic "micro apartments," vs their impoverished "slums"
You can't count somebody without a home at all as "living in a slum"
I would consider a location with habitats and no or unenforced building codes to be slums. So basically what the abundance guys want and every rental property in the us
are they counting urban villages as slums? because what else in modern China is even mildly slum-like?
sure, if you go to some very rural corner you can find people living in simple housing, but that's also not a slum, and you can find similar things in rural southern/eastern europe as well as taiwan and thailand which are all very pale in this map.
if they really count urban villages (or other migrant worker areas such as the less agreeable factory dorm areas) in urban china as "slums", which i guess is the only way you'd get anywhere near 20%, then surely you'd do the same for migrant worker areas in the US as well? if they count less fancy urban working class areas in China as "slums" then how come egypt, colombia and southeast europe are all bright pale?
what about the gulf states? migrant workers there (
western financebros and other scam artists not counted, i mean asian migrant workers) definitely live in worse conditions than chinese migrant workers and constitute a big percentage of the residents but apparently it doesn't count.
It’s very likely using similar dubious metrics as statistics that claim China has a 20-30% homelessness rate because it counts all the migrant workers that don’t officially own a home in the cities they migrate to (they count rental properties under this FYI) as “homeless” even though they all technically have homes in their home towns already.
Also yeah, it’s pretty hilarious that Thailand has a ‘pale white’ slum category while all their neighbours are much higher in percentage when Thailand one of the most unequal countries in the world when it comes to wealth and living standards. I mean just go to downtown Bangkok and you will literally find slum-like habitations next to high rise condominiums lol.
Western nations deliberately misunderstand seasonal migrant labour specifically for cases like this where they can claim it as evidence of a “homelessness”, “slums” or “forced labour” problem.
Flashback to western media reporting all local labor in Xinjiang as “forced” and that all the labourers were being sent to other regions of China somehow simultaneously
~~I think it's fair to say that itinerant homelessness is real homelessness, it should just be counted as its own category.~~ see below
these people are neither, they have a house in one province and rent an apartment in another (or worst case have a staff dorm as a job benefit)
Oh, I misread, my bad
all of china looks like the kowloon walled city don't you know?
Probably doesn’t count anyone who doesn’t own their own house as living.
for america? i could see that
I was thinking anywhere, but region-specific definitions would also help explain it.
honestly I'm shocked it has china = the u.s.
Because that one actually has a data based source interested in reporting reality
lol at the uk being low. i guess they have a very specific definition of slum
Maybe they mean percentage of the landmass
China is big and the east holds most of the population. The USA is also big. Both are largely “uninhabited”.
Colombia is 0-10%? Lol, gtfo