Photos of Colonial-Era Prison Turned Into Affordable Housing in Indonesia

At first glance, there are no signs of life here. It's not obvious, but inside, a community has made this rundown building a home. In the past decade, people have converted jail cells into an all-women's kost, a type of single-room housing commonly found throughout Indonesia.

The first thing we see is a tiny kiosk that offers cell phone credit. But past the tiny kiosk is a narrow wooden door locked from the inside. It's the only entrance to the former prison.

We meet Yanto, a middle-aged man and one of the managers of the kost. He's immediately skeptical. “How did you find out about this kost?" he says. "Are you sure about this? The facilities here are terrible."

He's not wrong. Yanto finally agrees to take us to see the only vacant room. The hallway leading to the room-slash-cell is dirty and dark. Yanto explains that he’s the one who transformed the former jail cells into rooms partitioned with plywood, with permission from the private company that owns Kalisosok Prison. Each cell was converted into six evenly-sized rooms, each measuring just 1.5 by 1 meter. One room costs Rp 130,000 ($9.16 USD) a month.

A television and some plastic chairs make up the living room, where residents mingle. The television is the only form of entertainment they have. A dangdut diva talent show is their favorite.

“We always dance when we listen to dangdut," Yanto says. "It turns the mood from quiet to lively."

“Tons of people want to live here," Yanto says. "People come and go every month. And if you act out of line, we’ll kick you out." As we talk to Yanto in the living room, the women, who all work at a nearby mall, flock into the kost. We watch the dangdut broadcast together, and some of the women sing along when a song they know comes on. At around 11 PM, everyone retreat to their tiny rooms.

Kalisosok Prison was built in 1750. In the past, Kalisosok Prison was a place many feared. Some of Indonesia's founding fathers like former president Sukarno, H.O.S Tjokroaminoto, W.R Soepratman, as well as notorious criminal Kusni Kasdut, were among its former inmates. There are countless of myths about the prison, including that you can hear sounds of a swan wailing at night from inside the building. But the threat of the ghost swan is nothing compared to the actual conditions that the low-income workers living at this kost face, which are frankly deplorable. Surabaya, like many big cities in Indonesia, has a strong mall culture. The difference is that in this city, many people don't have a lot of options for entertainment besides the malls. So there's a demand for cheap living accommodations among mall employees, who find it increasingly difficult to find affordable housing in a fast-growing city like Surabaya.

Over the last few years, the price of property in Indonesia's second largest city has rapidly skyrocketed in comparison to other regions in Indonesia. As a result, the gap in access to affordable housing has become a huge problem here.

“More and more people in Surabaya own unoccupied houses just as an investment,” Bintang Putra, researcher at Orange House Studio, an institute that conducts research on cities, tells VICE.

“The state of the property market is impacting the prices of housing that keep going up," he says. "That’s why alternative housing options like Kalisosok and Gedung Setan are popular."

Sri, one of the Kalisosok residents, agrees with Putra. She’s endured three years in this kost purely because it’s very affordable. She also doesn’t need to think about the commute to work every day, because the mall she works at is less than a kilometer away.

“I only live here on weekdays," she says. "Friday nights I go back to my hometown in Madura. So I don’t really need an expensive kost. And we totally understand that since it’s cheap, we can’t ask for much."

The residents start their daily activities at 5 AM. When one resident makes breakfast on a small stove in her room, smoke will fill the room next door. But it's just one of those things that the residents have gotten used to. There's a long line for the shower every morning, because there is only one bathroom in the entire building. The moss covering the bathroom is thick, and the clogged toilet gives it a perpetually pungent smell.

After taking a shower, the residents usually have breakfast together. At 8 AM, the building grows quiet as the women leave to go to work. It will be full of people again after 5 PM. They repeat this routine every day.

The local government boasts that Surabaya is an international caliber city, but places like the former prison shows just the opposite.

But the conversion of Kalisosok Prison—which holds official status as a cultural heritage site—into affordable housing is not all bad, at least according to Ayos Purwoadji, an architectural observer based in Surabaya. For him, the emergence of these kosts was triggered by the city government that doesn't properly protect cultural heritage sites, though Surabaya only has 160 of them.

“The emergence of these kosts is a spontaneous response from the public, who feels that residential space is becoming increasingly limited in the city," Ayos says. "I think the former prison is better as an affordable housing than a cultural heritage that can only be accessed by tourists.

"People taking up empty spaces like this is interesting. There’s something anarchic about it.”

This article originally appeared on VICE Indonesia.