What Kills Us This Week

An apartment building collapsed on Friday afternoon.  Five dead. Naturally HK is now in a frantic panic mode and there's to be an immediate inspection of all buildings over 50 years old in the triad-built areas of HK.

That's us, folks.  Wan Chai is triad-built and our building is about 60 years old. And I'm very pleased about this inspection.  In fact, I've been longing for one for years. Ever since we moved in, all the landlords around have been rubbing gleeful hands, throwing out existing tenants and renovating "Western-style" in order to attract Foreign Devil Sorts, all of whom expect to pay massive rents and so are pigeons ripe for plucking.

And naturally, "Western-Style" means larger windows and larger rooms and so all around us, for the past five years, jack-hammers butcher away at the fabric of this building, knocking down walls and I was starting to worry about whether engineers were inspecting this work and thinking that maybe the answer was no.

It takes about a two months in HK to get the permits to demolish a building.  However, in this weird world of "New New New" and "Latest is Greatest" it takes between five and seven years to get permits to renovate, so naturally, in such a stupid and insane situation that practically demands people break the law, no one gets permission to renovate for small changes like ripping out windows and internal walls.

And this goes on all around us, in old apartment buildings everywhere.  No, actually it's only in Wan Chai, Sheung Wan, Eastern District, Sham Shui Po, Kowloon City and Yau Tsim Mong; places that the wrecking ball hasn't yet reached so still have old buildings with apartments owned by individual landlords rather than entire blocks owned by giant corporations.

And who can blame these individual landlords from wanting big rents. And getting those big rents mean making changes.

Although they're all relatively small changes, when everyone in a building is doing them, these little changes all accrue and so it was only a matter of time.  And now it's happened: HK's first ever apartment collapse. And yes, the newspapers are reporting that the collapse was caused by individuals making their own individual renovations. 

And, naturally, in these hush-hush jack-hammer operations, no engineers are brought in to check out the structural integrity of this place. In our building, I've asked and it's all "Structural Engineer? What's that, la?" And, yes, cracks started to appear in our walls about two years ago and we are "spalling" something chronic.  

Never heard that word "spalling" before this but now everyone's throwing it around.  It means that plaster is flaking and dropping off the ceilings, and, yup, we too are "spallers".

And now we're on the list of suspect buildings and it's about bloody time. And I guess everyone around here now knows what a structural engineer is, la!

So that's my choice for this week:

THREATDOWN

Ripe-For-Plucking Pigeons like us

who are willing to pay higher rents.

And the landlords willing to indulge us.