Shanghai's Housing Administration Bureau has recently issued new rules to restrict flat sharing. It says home owners can only be allowed to rent out their apartment on one person or family per room basis. It is strictly prohibited for two or more flatmates to share one room.

As soon as this new policy was released, people voiced numerous complaints, especially recent college graduates and new immigrants to the city. How should this controversy be properly handled? Let us see if the media has a better solution.

An article from the Guangzhou Daily understands that the reason that Shanghai government has adapted the regulation is to curb greedy landlords from deliberately changing the structure of their residence to rent it out to more people, as well as other hygiene and safety problems.

However, the author points out that that new policy does not take into consideration those people who cannot afford the rent of an entire apartment. It can only make the life of low-income earners in Shanghai even harder. In recently years, housing prices in Shanghai, Beijing and other major cities have kept going up at an astonishing speed. What the government should concern itself with is keeping rent at an affordable level, that is the best solution, in the author's opinion.

An article from the Beijing Youth Daily sympathises with low-income people, who are the real victims of this policy. Despite admitting there are indeed quite a few problems associated with flat sharing, that author argues that in reality young people share an apartment with a partner or unknown person because they have no financial alternative. Naturally if financially sufficient enough, nobody would voluntarily choose this kind of lifestyle. In order to properly tackle this situation, the government needs to think of a much wiser approach.