It’s All Coming Down
On the left, a 1950s building that was demolished earlier this year
From afar, Hong Kong’s postwar buildings look plain and utilitarian, but look closer and you’ll notice their clean lines and vaguely Art Moderne details. I especially like their graceful interaction with the street: curved corners, large balconies (though most have been enclosed), shops on the ground floor and apartments above. Thousands of these buildings were built in the 1950s and 60s, as Hong Kong recovered from the depopulation and destruction of the Second World War. In their own homely way, they are to Hong Kong what Haussmanian apartment blocks are to Paris.
Now they are disappearing even more quickly than they were built. Hong Kong’s economy and system of governance is based largely on property development. In order to maintain its prosperity, land values need to remain extraordinarily high and the city needs to be constantly redeveloped, even though the population is only modestly growing. In other words, under the current regime, Hong Kong must cannibalize itself in order to survive.
Until this year, a property company that wanted to redevelop an old building needed to buy out 90 percent of the units in that building before it could force the others to sell. Now the government has lowered that quota to 80 percent, making it significantly easier for old buildings to be bought out and town down. Property developers have pounced. Since the policy was changed, they have started buying flats in nearly every old walkup building left in my neighbourhood.
In too many cases, what goes up in their place are skinny towers that sit atop parking-garage podiums that are usually ugly and overbearing, with lots of street-level space taken up by blank walls, service entrances and garage driveways. Lost is the intimacy and human scale of walkup buildings that aren’t too tall, have a fine-grained mix of shops and residences and whose apartments are within plain sight of the street.
In some gentrified parts of Hong Kong, dozens of flats in 1950s walkup buildings have been bought and renovated by small-time investors and developers. The success of Soho lies entirely with the fact that its postwar buildings have been preserved and restored rather than redeveloped, giving the area an amiable, unprepossessing feel. So far, this hasn’t happened to any great extent in Kowloon or the New Territories.
But even renovation doesn’t necessarily stop redevelopment. Last year, the government launched a new program that subsidizes the renovation of old buildings. So far, it has been a resounding success — except that in one case, a building that was being targeted by developers was renovated with government money. (I wrote about this in today’s South China Morning Post; you can read the article here.) Renovation might be increasingly popular, but the appeal of brute force redevelopment is still too strong to save a big part of Hong Kong’s urban fabric.
Tags: Hong Kong, Kowloon, Redevelopment
