SCOOP: Ladder St artwork killers have 8-year-outstanding "falling concrete" notice

Caine Road building owners' committee, which initiated action against Glorious Fast Food's colourful mural, has ignored a Mandatory Building Safety Inspection notice since January 2015.

In what must surely count as the most egregious case of misplaced priorities in Hong Kong this year, the Incorporated Owners of 147 Caine Road pressured a ground floor shop to remove art work (which looked, to them, a little bit seditious), all the while ignoring for EIGHT YEARS a Mandatory Building Inspection safety notice addressing crumbling concrete falling from the building.

The owners were issued the mandatory notice in January 2015 and, as yet, it remains marked "outstanding" on the Buildings Department database. The tatty building is one of 3,800 which have ignored such safety notices since 2013 and one of 330 ignored notices issued in that year: if Buildings Department was to properly prosecute, the fines for 147 Caine Road would be around a $15 million, with potentially jail time for the scofflaw owners.

Ignoring for a moment the ridiculousness of the building owners' original claim that any art featuring yellow hard hats is seditious or related to "black clad violence", there's a lot to unpack in exactly how this small group of owners came to have the power to not only have the government erase art work they didn't like but also to completely rise above the building laws designed to stop concrete chunks smashing down upon the street below.

Owners' Committees (OCs), have effectively been taken over by patriotic organisations. This began in the early 2010s when the government realised there was a massive power vacuum in these committees. Many buildings didn't have OCs, while those that did ran them badly. And so Home Affairs Department began populating OCs with patriotic thinkers – a sort of precursor to "Patriots Administering Hong Kong".

Under the "Resident Liaison Ambassador" scheme, ambassadors would "build up a good liaison network among residents and lay a good foundation for the future formation of OCs," according to the former Director of Home Affairs Pamela Tan in 2012.

And more recently, HAD invited "local organisations and NGOs" (the kind of outfits which pepper the streets with patriotic flags on significant holidays) to "reach out to owners to encourage and assist them in forming OCs".

You don't need to be a weatherman.

Pan-dems, while still free and active, called foul on hundreds of cases of elderly tenants or even owners complaining they'd been pressured or tricked into signing over proxy voting rights for OC meetings. While other jurisdictions have laws preventing such practice, there was nothing in Hong Kong to stop a small handful of people holding all the OC proxy votes for their building.

And with the general apathy amongst most owners towards keeping their buildings safe, the OCs were ripe for takeover by this fresh new energetic influx.

The power is real: when the 147 Caine Road OC decided to stamp out the cute artwork they viewed as seditious, they had the full support of the government. Just one day after their initial demand to Glorious Fast Food, Home Affairs Department swooped in and convinced the shop owners it was in their best interests to remove the colourful artwork¹.

How does anything in government work that fast? How do we have, on one hand, a 24-hour response time to an OC complaint of seditious art, but on the other hand Buildings Department ignoring potentially-deadly non-compliance for eight long years?

Perhaps the most ironic thing about all this is, walking past that ageing building with its crumbling facade, cracked concrete walls and disrespect of safety laws, a yellow hard hat might be the safest attire.

1. Note, Home Affairs didn't actually remove the artwork themselves, they issued a "kind reminder" in the now-familiar technique of a "nice fast food shop/Womens' March/Road Safety Newspaper you've got here, be a shame if someone started a National Security investigation into you and all your staff".