Hwang Hyeon-dong lives in a 6.6-square-meter (71-square-foot) cubicle near his university campus in Seoul, which comes with a shared bathroom and kitchen plus all the rice he can eat, that he rents for 350,000 won ($302) a month.
The sparsely furnished rooms, in premises called goshi-won, were previously mostly used by less well-off students to temporarily cut themselves off from the outside world while they studied for civil service job tests.
Now they are increasingly becoming permanent homes to young people like Hwang, who identifies himself among the "dirt spoons," those born to low-income families who have all but given up on social mobility.