China plans to tear down walls of gated condos and let public in

Bloomberg

For years, Ji Ping has put up with Beijing’s smog, traffic and high prices, but this could be the last straw. A government plan threatens to pull down the walls of her gated community and maybe even drive a public road through its manicured gardens.
“There are already so many things I’m not happy about here,” says Ji, 48, whose 21-year-old daughter studies in the U.S. “The environment, the smog. Many of my friends have left already. Now I’m thinking about leaving too.”
Her apartment is in Greenlake Place, a condo spread over an area almost twice the size of Yankee Stadium. It’s typical of the colossal residential projects that China built in their millions during the property-boom years — a vast walled tract of gardens and lakes, studded with giant tower blocks and patrolled by private security.
The government now views these oases as a waste of space, contributing to urban sprawl, traffic congestion and air
pollution.
A new urbanization blueprint announced in February aims to open up the compounds and punch streets through their peaceful gardens, increasing the urban density to reduce commuting distances and help accommodate the millions of people moving to the nation’s cities every year.
With as many as 80 to 90 percent of city-dwellers’ homes in these types of compounds, the stage is set for a major face-off between President Xi Jinping’s government and the middle-class homeowners who paid premium prices for their privacy.
“Get the popcorn, this is going to get interesting,” said Carl Minzner, a professor of law at Fordham Law School in New York, who specializes in Chinese law and governance.
“If Xi Jinping wanted to pick an issue that would intensely irritate the vested urban middle class, and at the same time resonate deeply with all of those left out by China’s go-go years, he couldn’t pick a better one than this.”

Soviet Inspired
Not just the middle class. The Soviet Union-inspired urban planning, with wide multi-lane boulevards poking into the suburbs, lined with compound after compound, is a favorite of China’s local governments who get about a fifth of their revenue from land sales. And powerful vested interests like the People’s Liberation Army and Ministry of Finance have large, gated communities for their employees in Beijing. As China’s cities grew rapidly, developers built these blocks further and further away from the center, often with few or no amenities like shops and restaurants and schools in the neighborhood.
Many residents need a long car journey for almost every activity, from dropping the kids at school to dining out or going to work. The new plan — which emphasizes densely populated communities, use of public transport and amenities and offices close by — aims to create more efficient cities with less traffic and exhaust fumes.
Building compact cities in China around mass transit systems could stop as much as 800 million tons of carbon dioxide from spewing into the atmosphere by 2030. That’s more than the combined emissions of Australia and Italy.
With 100 million more people set to move to China’s metropolises by 2020, the government has little time to find a solution.