2004 年 4 月 18 日 星期日 【晴】

Visit Report (交了的由它去版)
Visit Report – Homes for Cagemen (籠屋)

1) Around Yue Man Square, there are over eighty bus routes, around twenty minibus routes and MTR to reach most parts of Hong Kong, and nearly everything need for the living could be found quite easily (from eat to sleep, from enjoyment to fulfillment, from medical to government facilities / institutional, even religion / spiritual). There are a number of parks for recreation. The site where those ‘cages’ located is a 40 years old 8 storey building, the interior design is old fashioned and with poor maintenance, with no safety guards and so, it is dangerous for the about 20 people inside (once, there were over 2 hundreds people lived), and the cages owner often stolen by one of tenants. Recreational or social facilities are abundant, which could satisfy the basic needs of all ages, and the old man could walk to govt. clinic easily. As the area is surrounded by the commercial and industrial area nearby, together with MTR, it could be quite noisy. For population density, it could be quite high and intensive as there were over 200 people living in that around 1000 sq. ft., now, there are only 20 or few live there. By the way, this building got no lifts. By the way, the storage of LPS / kerosene could also cause fire disaster.

2) Appreciate: located in the busiest section of Kwun Tong District, easy to get all daily needs, entertainment / recreations and govt. services.
Disgust: the environment: too dirty ~ especially the way to toilet and bathroom (天井) and the toilet itself, decaying ~ too old with decaying structure and electric wires, dangerous ~ intensive storage of kerosene and LPG, too close between cooking area and living area, inconvenient ~ no lifts, only got 1 telephone and 1 TV

3) As ‘cage homes’ are illegal in some sense (especially for those in old buildings and refused to modify its structure). So, besides doing some repairing, what could be done may be just encourage the elderly to more away, move to a better place. But as he mentioned he won’t leave unless everyone could move out (to a better environment), may be install two new doors (one on each side of the corridor), add an alarm system, add more lights (to make it brighter), add more fans to increase ventilation, etc. etc. Also, add some lights in the stairs (form G/F to 8/F, even to the roof) and add some hand rails on the sides of stairs to prevent accidents when the old people go downstairs.

4) For suitability, exclude the high accessibility to many different kind of services for daily living as well as different part of Hong Kong, this kind of housing is absolutely not suitable for an old man (even a normal adult), with such poor living condition and poor insanitation, and lack of repairs in this decaying old building. But, it seems that the government didn’t do much things on that, the implement ordinance to control such kind of housing is not strict enough. And in my opinion, the government is in a sense that to tolerant her citizen to live in such environment to prevent opposition, as to replace cages home (籠屋) could cost billions of money, but to leave it there, she no needs to spend a cent (for compensation or ‘buy’ the flats back). Not only for those who live in cages, such situations (being ignored by the govt. / public) are common for vulnerable groups. (弱勢社群)

>>April 18, 2004 at 11:48:26 PM GMT+8