In a busy Shamshuipo street, workmen are putting finishing touches to a building which will fill a gaping hole in our public housing portfolio. When it opens in July, it will provide 312 well-designed individual homes for caged men.
Completion of the building in Shun Ning Street comes just in time. On July 2, the Bed Space Apartment Ordinance becomes law. The next day, inspectors are poised to raid some of the worst of the 150 registered bed space apartments. If they have not complied with demands for improvements in standards, they will be ordered shut down.
Occupants will be thrown out on to the streets. Shelley Lau, the Director of Home Affairs, predicted this likelihood more than two years ago when she started planning to provide decent homes for men she calls 'the unfortunates that we forgot'.
As inspectors order the worst caged homes to close down, occupants who qualify will move into the new premises. Without the new building, they would have been deprived of even the disgraceful and woeful sleeping spaces inside steel cages that have become a byword for Hong Kong's lack of compassion.
As yet, the specially designed and built housing block in Shun Ning Street has not been named. Ms Lau and her Home Affairs team, along with Land Development Corporation and Architectural Office staff, are thinking along lines of 'Rising Sun' or some other suitable Cantonese name that signifies a new beginning.
That's what the building promises. And about time, say many who have for years watched in disgust as slumlords netted profits from packing human beings into tenements sub-divided into tiny coffin-like squares.