Shanghai targets unmarried, gay tenants

The city is drafting rules to urge landlords to rent rooms only to families and individuals

SHANGHAI: Once dubbed the 'Whore of the Orient' for its colonial-era sleaze, China's financial capital Shanghai is drafting rules urging landlords not to rent rooms to unmarried couples and gays, local media reported on Wednesday.   

The city's housing bureau said it would issue new guidelines to landlords which would advocate only renting rooms to families and individuals, the Beijing News said, citing a local newspaper. "This means limits will be placed on boyfriends and girlfriends, or same-sex partners, from renting a room together," the paper said.   

The articles, which also banned landlords renting out individual beds and sub-dividing rooms, would demand that tenants occupy a minimum 54 sq ft of space each, the paper said. Many Shanghai residents, particularly students and newly arrived migrant workers from poorer rural areas, often rent bunk beds in cramped communal rooms to save costs in a city where property prices and rents have soared in recent years.   

The report did not make clear whether the new rules were merely guidelines or have the force of law.   

Local media in unusually frank editorials denounced the housing bureau as arrogant and said the rules unfairly targeted Shanghai's poor.   

"This matter in essence... attacks the people who can least afford it," a commentary in the Southern Metropolitan Daily said.