tim's experiment

When I was still working for the SCMPost I wrote a piece congratulating (not entirely sincerely) local building inspectors on reaching a state of such progress in their work that time and money could be spared to pursue the owners of trivial adornments on three-story rural houses. One might have thought they had more urgent matters to attend to. And now that an elderly building has collapsed it seems they have. The department concerned has now decided to proceed urgently with inspections of hundreds of elderly multi-story buildings in run-down areas of the city. In other words they are going to conentrate on the most dangerous ones. Apparently nobody had thought of this move before…
Meanwhile a fascinating revelation in the Post, attributed to “a person familiar with renewal projects”. It goes like this: “Buying flats from developers usually costs much more than compensating individual owners. Instead of paying for a seven-year-old flat, the (URA) would have to compensate developers for the forsaken redevelopment opportunity.” Think about that. If the urban renewers buy your crumbling hovel from you, they will haggle over local hovel prices. If they buy it from a developer they throw money to compensate for his lost dreams. I wish I could say this was hard to believe.