The Houshayu Financial Business Zone

I’ve been taking a morning bike ride to get the heart pumping.  Usually this is a means to an end.  I’ll be heading over to the gym at the girls’ school and then I’ll turn around and bike home, having ticked the cardio box.  I found out last week that the gym would be closed for the summer.  They’ve been doing renovations in other parts of the school all year long so we’re apparently now taking apart the gym.

So, I bike over to the school, as I always do and just keep going up to An Hua Jie and over to Tian Bei Lu and then back home.  It isn’t even a half and hours-worth of peddling, but it gets me moving and I never have much trouble justifying mounting the bike to go.  I always try to pause, to appreciate that I’m in a tee-shirt instead of my enormous winter jacket, as I’d otherwise been dressed during the dark, cold winter rotation.

Today I considered some poster boards which I’d otherwise read, but hadn’t properly registered.  All wall’s up along the south west side of Tian Bei Lu which blocks of the old Houshayu village where not so long ago a few thousand people lived.  They, along with a few dozen other villages, have all been moved into the dramatic row of high-rise projects, which now populate the field across from the International School.  I had long assumed another, better-than-thou and utterly unnecessary villa would be built on the land that all forced migration made available.

Today I read and cognated that these signs were announcing the soon to arrive reality of the “Houshayu Financial Business Zone.”  Oh no.  What the hell’s that?  Do we really need a new zone?  Down the street is the overbuilt New Convention Center which began to look old and deteriorated the year after it was built.  (No trouble finding funds to build it, but none set aside to maintain it or if there were, they'd already been siphoned.)  I don’t know what will populate the Financial Business Zone, but it will almost certainly be another real estate boondoggle, that will mean overbuild, more traffic and less green space.  It won’t be long before this whole neighborhood becomes another Wang Jing.  I hope I’m out by then.

Friday, 6/28/19