New York City has a population of 8.5 million people. Shenzhan, China has 12.5 million. Shenzhan is also the second most expensive place in China to live after Hong Kong.
I just watched a Youtube video by Where’s Poppy where she broke down her monthly expenses for her and her boyfriend living in Shenzhan and then split them in half to give an idea of the monthly cost of living for one person.
Cost of living is $833 a month.
This includes groceries, rent, utilities, drinkable water, transportation, eating at restaurants, and splurging a little here and there.
To put this in perspective, renting a two bedroom apartment in Baton Rouge, LA can cost about $700-900. The same size apartment in Brooklyn is upwards of $1,000, if I remember correctly.
Eight-hundred, thirty-three dollars a month can have you eating at some of the fanciest restaurants in town, an apartment with it’s own, personal coffee shop and bar for the tenements, and transportation anywhere in a city that takes over an hour to get entirely across.