Tower project exploits loophole
Flats in a project dominating the skyline in Tsim Sha Tsui are being sold at sky-high prices after the developer used a now-closed loophole to win approval for a building density that planners say should never have been allowed.
The Masterpiece, which rises 67 storeys in Hanoi Road, was built to density standards usually applied to commercial developments although it includes 345 apartments that are on the market for an average HK$20,000 a square foot - while one sold recently for a record-setting price of more than HK$30,000 per sq ft.
The builder, New World Development, was able to include the flats, which occupy 40 floors of the towering, wall-like structure, by describing them as serviced apartments, which it would have been unable to sell under guidelines enforced before and after it gained planning approval.
The project, part of the K11 development launched in the mid-1990s by the defunct Land Development Corporation, a forerunner of the Urban Renewal Authority, has a plot ratio - the formula that determines a site's density, or permitted floor space as a multiple of the site area - of more than 12, well above the nine or at most 10 that architects and planners say would usually be approved for a mixed development in Kowloon.
In building it New World was able to take advantage of a loophole that appeared in 1999 when the Lands Department, after lobbying by the Real Estate Developers Association, removed a ban on serviced apartments being sold to individual buyers. This window of opportunity, which opened two months before New World sought planning approval for the project, was later closed when, amid concern by Town Planning Board members and government officials, developers building serviced apartments were required to guarantee they would not be sold individually.
The development was also the first and only urban renewal project in which individual owners were allowed to take part. When the project was launched, it became clear that New World owned most of the properties in 20 rundown blocks in Hanoi Road cleared to make way for it. Now the Planning Department is under pressure to explain why the site is zoned commercial while most of the development is clearly residential.