We get these stories now and then. The ones about some astonishing number of men living in a small space, and an inspector catching them at it and fining the landlord.

In this case, it was 20 men sharing a one-bedroom apartment in the Dubai International City neighorhood.

How did they manage it?

At the news meeting someone suggested, “They must have the world’s all-time biggest bunk beds.”

Well, perhaps they do. That would help.

But according to the story in The National, the 20 guys shared the single bedroom by operating in two shifts of 10.

That’s still crazy.

This sort of overcrowding is not unusual here because of the thousands and thousands of low-income laborers brought into the country. Their choices are to live in work camps (Abu Dhabi has camps on the mainland) or, in Dubai especially, to crowd into aging apartments.

If rent is divided 20 ways … housing is really cheap.

Policing this is difficult.

We live in what probably is a middle/lower-middle neighborhood, made up mostly of families, but one apartment about two blocks from where I am sitting has quite a few guys living in it.

I was walking past one day when I saw six to eight young men climb out of a minivan and all enter the same door in a three-story building. (I like to think they were living, say, three per room … but I somehow doubt that is the case.)

Landlords don’t like to rent to “bachelors” (the euphemism here for single men, usually from the subcontinent), because it signals the imminent conclusion of the property as a revenue-producing place.

Imagine the wear 20 guys put on a one-bedroom. It is going to age in a hurry. So you do it for the last 2-3 years of a place before it is condemned and torn down.

The legal camps are not exactly inviting because even then the men are living six to a room, with three bunk beds. With a significant chunk of the day lost in transit for workers from their camps to their jobs on the island of Abu Dhabi.

Also, the camps do not offer much in the way of entertainment, and when the guys get their one day off (Friday, generally), they are stuck in the camp — unless they can catch a ride into town.

So, housing is an ongoing problem for the unskilled guys who come here to work.

The cab driver I talked to today, on a 20-minute ride, who is from Sri Lanka said: “Living here is not so hard for English or Americans, but for us, with not many skills, it is hard.”