A stubborn grandfather had a motorway built around his house in China after refusing to move, despite being offered £180,000 in compensation.
Huang Ping’s two-storey home in Jinxi, China, is now surrounded by a construction site with constant dust, noisy builders and vibrating walls.
He says he now regrets not taking the Chinese government’s money and fears what living in his property will be like once the expressway opens in Spring.
“If I could turn back time, I would agree to the demolition conditions they offered. Now it feels like I lost a big bet,” he said.
It’s interesting to discover the Chinese government uses less coercion than the US government in these situations.
With the US government’s right of Eminent Domain, there is no choice. The government does reimburse you, but there’s no choice involved.
180k is pennies when you’re asking someone to move out of their own home.
And it probably cost them 10x that to make all the modifications and special allowances to build around the house. They definitely could have increased the offer.
I suspect they do this to show the other holdouts what happens when you want more than everyone else got.
He could 100% have gotten a new house for that. Thats nearly 2 million yuan. So long as hes not going to like, Beijing, anyhow.
There is an even better one with multiple houses and a pub!
The inside access road onto the roundabout is an interesting one to experience.
That’s amazing!!!
Weird to see this come up. Let’s just say I regularly drive past here.
It was quite a nice pub last time I visited. Not ideal to get to on a road bike though.
aol?
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Does anyone have any frame of reference for how much it roughly cost to build around the house?
Million, maybe a few. Less than ten
Move for health and noise reasons then open a coffee shop on the land. Sell land when they wanna build extra lanes
That one is an urban myth.
A farmhouse in the middle of one of Britain’s busiest motorways has been made the subject of a documentary. Stott Hall Farm, one of West Yorkshire’s best known sights, appears cut off by the M62 motorway, with east- and westbound lanes dividing around the building.
For 10 years, it has been home to farmer Paul Thorp, who has grown used to the constant hum of the traffic. Danny Lomax, 28, a student filmmaker, said: ‘I wanted to find what it was like for someone to live in the middle of one of the country’s busiest roads, while living the life of a hill farmer.’
The documentary also debunks the urban myth that the motorway curves around the farmhouse because a former owner refused to move. ‘It was the landscape that meant the motorway couldn’t be built right through and had to be built around it,’ said Lomax.
Good for him, sit it out. Eventually they’ll want to expand the road and he or his future relatives will hit pay dirt.
Wait, this is a real thing that happened in reality? I thought this was the Onion
