Ditching the Mid-Levels

For many people over many decades, the Mid-Levels—the area up the hill from Bonham and Caine roads—was the ideal neighborhood to live in. This high-priced residential area has long been symbolic of social status. In early colonial days, only the British were allowed to live there. Today, Mid-Levels is known as the neighborhood of the rich and famous, with the city’s lowest crime rate. However, the past decade has seen the Mid-Levels turn into yet another overcrowded, overpolluted residential district just like any other in Hong Kong.

And the worst is yet to come—overpopulation and congestion will only increase in the coming decade thanks to new MTR stations in the area, another escalator, and a new law that makes the tearing down of smaller old buildings to be replaced by towering skyscrapers much easier. This all means more traffic, more pollution and many, many more people—government projections see the population rising by 10 percent in the area over the next 10 years.

Visit any property agent in the Mid-Levels and you’ll get an idea of just how expensive it can be there—most flats have a price tag of over $10,000 per square foot these days, and we’re not even talking about the new, primary market properties (the Mid-Levels being home to the controversial 39 Conduit Road development, which contained an apartment that Henderson Land falsely claimed had been sold for $88,000 per square foot, which would’ve made it the most expensive flat in the world).

But it wasn’t just for status that so many people originally moved to the area—the Mid-Levels was long known as one of the city’s quieter, greener districts because of the abundance of trees and lack of public transport. It was untouched by the MTR and only a handful of diesel-spewing buses stopped in a few areas. Many residents relied instead on the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator, which links the district to Central, or took private transportation.

But ultimately the Mid-Levels owes its success as a highly livable district to the government-imposed constraints on development. The area has traditionally been less crowded—it’s that simple. In 1972, the government imposed a moratorium on the area, “introduced on traffic and transport grounds.” As the Ombudsman explained in a report in 2006, “in the light of the traffic assessment and the known extent of development then, it was concluded that for the Mid-Levels area, all further sales of Government land, and all further modifications of Government leases to permit more intensive development, should be deferred.”

However, the moratorium also clearly stipulated that it was not to be used to prohibit development. In fact, because the moratorium is merely a set of administrative measures, they don’t override private property rights, according to the Development Bureau, which means that the Lands Department “must respect the development rights as permitted under the lease.” Plus, since many of the private land leases in the Mid-Levels were signed way before 1972, the moratorium technically doesn’t touch them and the government cannot control these private owners from redeveloping their land. Since the 1980s, many of the six-storey high buildings in the area, most of them tong laus, were knocked down to make way for buildings 30 or even 40 storeys tall.