A ¥30-Million Nanjing Mansion's Garage Exit Opens Into a Public Tunnel — and the Price Has Halved

The buyers of Yuecheng Tiandi, a compound of large luxury flats beside Nanjing's Yaowan Street tunnel, paid thirty million yuan and more for a promise: the tunnel beneath their homes would be theirs alone, a private approach for private cars. On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, a notice went out — the tunnel would open as a municipal public road the following day. Within weeks, residents say, their homes had lost roughly two-thirds of their value.

Reporters from China Blue News, the broadcaster that broke the story on Weibo, drove the tunnel themselves and found the arrangement exactly as described: openings cut into the side walls of a working municipal tunnel, one leading to the compound's parking garage, the other to a neighbouring shopping district's. With the tunnel open to public traffic, garage-bound cars from two different worlds now mix in the same dim corridor — which, the owners argue, is both a safety problem and the end of the quiet they paid for.

The money is the part that travels beyond Nanjing. Flats bought for more than 30 million yuan are now valued, owners say, at around 10 million; one owner has listed at 15 million and found no takers. "The most special thing about this case is that it was sold as a private passage and became a public road after handover," one commentator wrote. "An oral promise is worth least precisely here — you can't pin it to paper, so when something goes wrong there is nothing to check it against." Another widely shared comment was blunter: a developer's word cannot be trusted "unless it is in black and white."

Then came the part regulators may have to answer for. When China Blue News asked the Qinhuai District construction bureau and the city planning bureau's Qinhuai branch whether cutting a residential garage entrance into a municipal tunnel is even lawful, officials said the responsible people were in a meeting and would call back. As of press time, three days later, nobody had.

The story has climbed onto Baidu's search board, where the questions are the owners' own. It also lands on a country still working out what a home is worth to it — buyers who paid top-of-market prices during the boom now face both the downturn and the small print they never got. The people who spent thirty million, as the same commentator observed, "weren't buying the tunnel; they were buying quiet and boundaries. Now they have neither." Until the planners say whether the hole in the tunnel wall was ever legal, that distinction — private road, public road — remains a question, not a deed.