A place to call home? This 66yo cleaner can’t sit up straight in his 80 sq ft space ... and CY Leung’s policies won’t help, he says
Initiatives in Leung’s policy address are of no use to me, says the elderly worker
Living in one of the city’s notorious subdivided flats is bad enough, but cleaner Lam Wai-kau has spent more than a decade in a tiny “loft” subdivided from a subdivided flat.
Lam’s Sham Shui Po home takes the form of a cockloft hanging above the carved-up spaces at the end of a narrow corridor.
The 66-year-old works seven days a week cleaning a public housing estate and has just three or four days off a year.
To reach his stark cell, Lam climbs a precarious makeshift ladder made out of a wooden box and a few old planks stacked on a rusty iron stand. Then he pushes himself through a small hole cut out of the wooden ceiling to access his living space above.
Inside, the cement ceiling is so low that Lam cannot sit up straight. The place he has called home since 2005 is less than 80 sq ft and costs a few hundred dollars a month in rent.
“The environment is terrible, but it’s cheap,” explains Lam with a shrug.
While Lam, who is waiting for a public housing flat, hopes that the government can do more in terms of giving elderly people a better safety net after retirement, he is not sure if anything will actually change in reality.