Every day they sit and chat under a shelter, sharing snacks and photos to keep each other entertained. But the dozens of residents and property owners of Mei Foo Sun Chuen are not there to have fun - they are keeping an eye on a construction site they managed to shut down two weeks ago.
Every afternoon, about a dozen elderly residents, and a few younger ones, gather outside the site to make sure workers are not trying to get in and start work again. At night, residents are split into teams to watch the site in two-hour shifts.
'If anything goes wrong, we'll blow our whistles and beat a drum to alert others to come down here,' resident Lo Chung-cheong said.
When a truck and some workers tried to enter the site before dawn on March 14, two residents, including Lo, scrambled over the barbed wire and tried to block it.
For most of the 400 residents of this middle-class estate who are involved in the campaign, this is their first protest. 'I didn't think about it much when I did it, I just wanted them to stop working on the site until we have reached an agreement with the developer,' Lo, a design teacher, said. 'I'm not radical in my views and would never have imagined I would behave like one of those young protesters.'
Lo said the protest was not just about Mei Foo. 'We want the power shifted away from property tycoons - we want the government to see that better planning is needed.'