Construction – The City is Taking Over

A Chat With Sandy

This morning I met a lady from Tsing Tau Village walking her dog, Jackson. I will call her Sandy. I asked Sandy about the construction. She told me they are putting up 22 public housing high rises. I asked her how many floors high they would be. She didn’t know, but from looking at the buildings we could see that many of them are already 25 stories high. Let’s just estimate they go another 5 stories, and the buildings will be 30 stories high. They could build them 40 stories high. We just don’t know but for the sake of making a conservative guess we will say 30 stories high. If we multiply 30 times 22 buildings we can get an estimate of the number of floors. It would be 660 floors. Then for each floor let’s guess that there are 8 apartments. Again it could be more, but that would equal 5280 apartments. That’s a lot of apartments. If 2 people lived in each apartment, that would be over 10,000 people in total. That’s a lot of people. I asked Sandy how long she thought it would take she said 2 years. Big changes are coming.

The Effect on the Environment

I didn’t get a chance to ask Sandy what the Tsing Tau residents thought of all the construction. I am sure many of them move there to get away from city life. Now the city is moving to them. The city seems to be taking over. Tsing Tau’s waterfront is really pretty. I love walking into town by way of the waterfront. The biggest problem is the tide being unpredictable. On this particular day, I walked through the water with my shoes on. Of course, it takes longer than walking down SaiSha Road but it is so much more scenic. The wild life in this area is definitely affected. If they could talk to us, they would say stop the development. The other day I was reading a blog from a Tsing Tao resident that claimed the number of dumpster raids committed by pigs has dramatically increased. Wild pigs can no longer find sufficient food in the forest to feed themselves so they raid the dumpsters. I imagine the cows are complaining also. They need green grass and vegetation for grazing, but there is less and less of it available. Check out A Home For The Cows To Come Home To, to see more on this.

There’s no doubt that we are negatively affecting the ecosystem. However, on a positive note, Hong Kong will be getting more public housing. Many people have been on a list for 10, 20 or even more years.