Govt becomes top coffin home landlord
John Lee’s first major housing venture is a coffin home camp for imported workers. If we can’t afford to house imported workers with basic human dignity, we shouldn’t be importing them at all.
Despite pledging to stamp out cage homes by 20491 and despite John Lee announcing a new Cage Home Task Force in the Policy Address this week, the government, through its partner Construction Industry Council (CIC), is planning to become the top coffin home landlord in the city.
A former Covid quarantine facility in Yuen Long is about to open its gates to the first batches of 7,000 construction workers from the mainland under the Construction Sector Imported Labour Quarters (CSILQ) scheme, giving tenants just 50 sq ft of living space each.
The Yuen Long camp – never used and dubbed a Covid White Elephant at the time of construction2 – has around 1,800 pre-fab containers tacked together in a prison-camp layout which, to give you an idea of the size of this 7,000-population town, would all fit very nicely within the bounds of the Happy Valley grass horse track.
Each barred-window cabin was originally designed for one (possibly two if there was an emergency) Covid patient: each will now house four workers in close proximity. Yes, we're building a work camp of fresh coffin homes right there in the Northern Metropolis.
I visited the site yesterday, braving snakes3 and a million wetland mosquitoes to peer over fences and compare the actual view against the cheery “My Blog” post of Development Secretary Bernadette Linn.
On the plus side, it is the only building for 20 square miles which doesn’t have YOHO in its name and, being a massive eyesore on satellite photos of the wetlands, it’s quite easy to find.
There’s not much to see from the outside, given the three-metre metal-sheet perimeter fence – but it’s grim, of course. The cabins are small, the barred windows oppressive, the open space is all rough concrete.
At the time it was built, some pandemic commentators marked the cabins as okay-ish for one but rather cramped accommodation for two.
For four, it’ll be admirable if the occupants go a week without beating the crap out of each other. From Linn’s blog, each cabin boasts a small table with a kettle and four chairs optimistically placed as if all four occupants could comfortably sit together. There’s two bunk beds, four metal wardrobe lockers, three power outlets and two packets of wire coat hangers. The windows are still barred (WHY!?). Each cabin has a half fridge/freezer and a massive black garbage bin.
In her photo opp, petite Development Secretary Bernadette Linn made the place look overcrowded.
There’s no evidence of more than one of the “green areas” highlighted on Linn’s blog. That sad little AstroTurf patch had two tables, two benches and four chairs. For 7,000 people.
There is a very sad gym and a sad common room with 60 of the same uncomfortable hard white chairs of the cabins and a 60-inch TV. There’s a set of kitchens, each with a couple of induction cookers on a table and a bank of four microwaves on metal shelves: water from hot/cold dispensers but no obvious sink.
I saw hundreds of Huawei boxes and Cat 4 cable spools strewn about the place, inside and out, with an obviously hasty networking job having taken place before the top brass visited earlier this month. Garbage disposal doesn’t seem thought through yet, if they’re dumping stuff on public highways already.
A CIC spokesperson told me the first occupants would begin arriving soon and that there were 14 employment agencies working to fill the 7,000 jobs on offer. She reiterated the SecDev’s comments that the workers would be bussed out (in hundreds of buses) at 7:30am, before the morning rush hour, and that their individual employers would arrange dinner for them before their return “as we don’t really have any facilities for dinner”.
She didn’t respond yet on whether the camp would be non-smoking and whether smoking would be allowed in cabins, but I feel that’s one area where the architects simply stuck their heads in the sand and hoped for the best.
House them like we need them
The arguments for imported workers are weak enough but if we really do need these workers to keep Hong Kong moving, there’s no excuse for housing them so poorly.
We’re not in any kind of state of emergency: apparently we’re already transitioning from Stability to Prosperity, so let’s share some of that.
I’ve glimpsed Chinese work camps in Zambia, creating Prosperity for the Belt and Road (with angry-looking guards toting AK47s to prevent any interaction between workers and locals), and, aside from being entirely insulated from the communities they’re Belting and Roading, they don’t look bad places from the outside: at one outside Lusaka I could see a stage, a running track and football fields. So the Belt and Road workers in Africa perhaps have it better than those shipped to “Asia’s World City”, at least in terms of daily living experience.
To be fair to the government, if they reduced the capacity to one per cabin – 1,800 workers – it wouldn’t be a bad place to live. If they took the bars off the windows, included a playing field and some bleachers, cycle racks and free bikes on the riverside, a minibus stop out the front, a better cinema and lounge, kitchens designed by people who have cooked at least once in their lives, it could be a model to share.
Yuen Long could also be a model for transitional housing out of local cage homes: there was some discussion last year of moving the worst afflicted cage home-dwellers into cabins at the Kai Tak quarantine facility, but the local upper middle class, led by lawmaker Kitson Yang, came out in force at the very suggestion of other temporary public housing in their district, so the camp plan was quietly and sadly dropped.
Private operators follow suit
A more humane capacity limit (1,800 instead of 7,000) would also raise a red flag to new private operators of imported labour, like minibus owner Eric Tse, who was bragging in the SCMP this month about how he will cram 14 mainland minibus drivers into a 600 sq ft Tsuen Wan apartment he’s rented as part of the government's scheme to import 1,700 minibus and coach drivers from across the border.
That works out at 42 sq ft for each worker, smaller than even the average coffin home, and surely illegal on many fronts, not least from fire safety, occupancy and guesthouse regulations, not to mention tenancy agreements and basic consideration to the building’s existing occupants.
None of four government departments have responded to my questions on this, which is a shame because the mini-tycoon plans many more of these illegal guesthouses to house drivers for his 90-strong minibus fleet, as do other bosses benefitting from the imported labour scheme.
If you’re wondering why, in 2023, a business owner is able to publicly boast of his exploitation of both residential law and imported workers, with nary a tough question from the newspaper and silence from the government, it’s presumably because the government itself actually set the work camp prototype for these grubbers to follow.
The whole concept is rather depressing. Literally the first new-concept housing of any scale provided by John Lee’s administration will be these coffin squats. It’s not like Lee is stuck with legacy policies or long-standing imported worker traditions – these are brand new innovations, creating labour and housing schemes on the shifting sands of quick profits instead of seeking a more solid foundation along the lines of the old Sha Tin or CityOne new town models, where human dignity did play a part in design.
One can only guess that China State Construction, the state-owned giant building half the city (including the ICAC headquarters, police headquarters and most of Disneyland) and whose footprints are all over the work camp, is somehow getting what it wants out of the hastily arranged deal.
Our mainland friends are at least being paid fairly well, reportedly, compared to mainland earnings. But how much of that pay packet will go on “fees” to middlemen or even the camp bosses themselves is not known. For the private operators, I don’t know if minibus owner Tse is charging his imported workers rent or taking it out of their pay, but I doubt he’s simply giving them a place to live free of charge.
DEAD IN THE WATER: Quick update on District Council campaign
Today’s the last day of nominations and, sadly, I must drop out of the District Council race. I don’t have a single “Three Committees” nomination.
One lesson learned: I regret the decision to work on the Three Committee nominations first, because it left me with no spirit for the “public” nominations later. I thought it unfair to ask private individuals, even friends and neighbours, for their nomination given I knew the campaign was dead (around two weeks ago, when it became clear I was getting none of those crucial committee nods). If starting over, I’d get the individual noms first, well ahead of time, and use that as ammunition in approaching the Three Committees. Not that it would make any difference at all, of course, other than the good PR of being able to say I had public support.
I’ll update more on the DC race later, including the rather uncompetitive nature of most seats: only around 14% of seats have more than two candidates.
In the meantime, HK01 has a good investigative story about Three Committee members using fake addresses and perhaps not being properly registered voters (which would disqualify them from the committee). This includes Yeung Ngai from Kowloon City, who I never managed to track down and who used an address in North Point (against the rules) which turned out wasn’t her residential address (really against the rules) and which also turned out to be the headquarters of a “China Friendship Association” (not against any rules but it’s one of those secretive trade associations which is a small hop from your basic triad organisation). Interesting!
Yes 2049, not a typo: Xia Baolong, head of the State Council's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs’ office, said Hong Kong has to say zài jiàn to subdivided flats and cage homes by that date.
I covered it for Transit Jam as the construction destroyed a wonderful stretch of bike path, which, by the way, has never been restored and has now been reclaimed by nature, as seen in the photo gallery above.
OK, I didn’t exactly “brave” the snakes, I saw a big fat brown-black snake as I was trying to find the camp sewage outlet and bravely ran away without even stopping to take the serpent’s portrait. I stuck to tarmac from thereon in.
4 in one of those flats boggles the mind. If they don't all kill each other, it will be really fun when one of them drops a cigarette at night and a whole row becomes a tinderbox -- without a fire extinguisher in sight.