this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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Not gonna lie, I don’t think that’s enough recreation space for the number of units there.
And I don’t see any commercial space at all. That’s got to be enough units for several thousand people. Like, think about how much store space would be needed to make sure they could get all their groceries.
Yeah, I got that impression as well. Looks heavily overbuilt, with the amenities being more there to attract new residents than to serve the community.
Probably because this is a top down view at the center of a ring of impossibly tall housing units, not a skyline view of Hong Kong, a city that's got commercial spaces from seaside to Shenzhen.
Where you see the tennis courts probably isn’t street level, and the area below is commercial, restaurants and parking.
I mean, that’s kind a huge issue in Hong Kong, like, how concentrated the commercial areas get. Creates a lot of unnecessarily long travel from housing to commercial, culminating in a lot of pedestrian congestion along stairways, elevators and escalators.
Pedestrian congestion is a big problem in lots of major urban centers. Go down to Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo or Times Square in NYC and you'll find the same problem of big crowds of people clogging areas that weren't designed to accommodate the sheer volume of traffic.
Idk if I'd call it "unnecessarily long travel" so much as "a necessary consequence of this many people living in a limited space". If you don't want that level of crowding, you've got to move outside this hyper-dense city.
I mean, NYC has a fairly healthy level of pedestrian traffic in most areas. Times Square is mostly just full of tourists. I’m not as familiar with Tokyo but my understanding is a a lot of the more dense areas have a sort of 2/3 level layout of commercial, but there is level interconnects or they’re set up in conjunction with transit. So like, there are fairly large underground commercial strips at subway level, or sky bridges between blocks for 2nd story commercial.
They all get backed up during rush hour. It took me ten minutes to get into Shinjuku station one sunny afternoon, because that corner of town was so crammed with people.
Similarly, if you've ever been in the subway tunnels of NYC or DC, you'll know when a game lets out at Madison Square or a parade is happening though the Washington Mall, because these otherwise spacious underground enclaves are stuffed with people.
At some point, you have an issue of induced demand. These urban centers are designed to encourage the free flow of pedestrian traffic and... that's exactly what they create.
Tennis games are 50 vs 50
Not everyone plays tennis and the commercial spaces would be on the first level facing the road, not the inner courtyard. Good complaints in general but not really applicable here.
I don’t think that the first level would be enough TBH. Like; it would probably have to be 2 or 3 stories of commercial to serve just the bare minimum needs of that volume of people, and now half your commercial is off street level, complicating pathing from public transit.
Also, it’s tennis, what I assume is racket ball, a swimming pool and a couple basket ball court, so I think it’s actually a pretty good variety of activities, but still, not enough space for the volume of people, if all the blocks around it were the same density and had different varieties of activity, there still just wouldn’t be enough recreational space for the volume of people, even if the variety was absurd between them all.
Like, maybe the density is warranted somewhere like hongkong where the government is largely funded by land sales, so maximizing the density is important for making the land sale valuable enough to fund social services, but like, there’s just not enough visible recreation and comercial, maybe they’ve got a strip underground by a subway station or something. I’d be curious how they make this work.
10–12 stories, a little mall
the lower stories would be more valuable. i would think there’s at least one grocery store on the ground level.
i think people are used to taking the escalator in malls
Yah but you’re gonna need a lot of escalators and they’re gonna be very congested. Like, I’m sure it can be made to work, I just question the wisdom of having the commercial be separated out like that.
most chinese malls mainland or not are used to and designed for handling that many people; in fact probably the rest of east asia too. they do have a lot of escalators. hong kong’s got 7M and the mainland 1.4B after all
I also think those recreational spaces may be raised from street level. The perspective is not not meant to show any of that. Could be grocery stores etc. below it as well.
You're assuming there are commercial spaces, not you don't know anymore than he doesn't know. So it's not really applicable here.