Two different takes on preservation of courtyard homes in Beijing:

“… the growing historical awareness among intellectuals and the wealthy has unleashed a … set of destructive capitalist forces. The courtyard houses’ sudden architectural cachet has made them coveted status symbols for people with seemingly unlimited resources. As affluent foreigners and China’s new rich buy the houses, they are embarking on multimillion-dollar renovations that are robbing the neighborhoods of their souls.

When two or three generations were packed into a single house, family life spilled out into the courtyards and narrow alleyways. Streets were lined with tiny shops and food stands; elderly people sat on folding chairs playing card games as bicycles streamed by.

Today a well-off couple may live with a single well-behaved child in a courtyard home that once housed more than a dozen people. Instead of cooking outdoors or walking to the corner to use a toilet, the nuclear family installs a state-of-the-art kitchen and bathroom with sauna and spa and parks a car in a new underground garage. One Chinese magnate recently added an underground pool. Streets that once teemed with life are as silent as churchyards — and as banal as some American subdivisions.” — Nicolai Ouroussoff

…

“… a growing number of foreigners [and rich Chinese] have invested in the [courtyard] houses in recent years, refurbishing them with the mix of modern sensibility and respect for original detail one expects of a high-end renovation in Brooklyn or East London. At a time when the siheyuans, some of them centuries old, have been disappearing at an alarming rate, these renovators, along with some newly moneyed Chinese ones, are emerging as the city’s best hope for holding on to what’s left of the old hutongs, even as they transform dwellings that once housed dozens of people into private homes for their own small families, and provoke many of the same anxieties that gentrifiers do in the West.” — Dan Levin

I side with Levin more than Ouroussoff (Mr. O. comes across as the worst kind of presumptuous snob with his comment about Nanluoguxiang: “Foreigners walk aimlessly up and down the street, guidebooks in hand, soaking up the phony cultural atmosphere.”) You don’t want to romanticize the old hutong life (and its central toilets) too much. I frequently bike through some old neighborhoods near my (soulless, anonymous, newly-built) apartment building, and they’re generally awful, squalid places.

Michael Meyer is quoted in the Levin article: “In a hutong… people look out for one another.” Maybe, but more importantly, people (mainly old ladies) spy on and gossip about you and your family. The ugliness of communal life can outweigh the good.