Notice anything odd about this building? How about no exterior adornment. No paint, no plaster, no nothing. And this an area with plenty of salt-water spray to cause the rebar to corrode. I asked my new Chinese acquaintance, Anthony Wai, what the story was...
From Anthony: "Your question about housing is actually quite an interesting one. The reason is not culture.
For this type of housing, we have a local name for them -- "Salty water house/building". Obviously there is no english translation for such a term, but literally we call them like this in the Chinese language. Most of them were built around 1970/80s era. 1970s is where Hong Kong really starts to take off the ground in terms of economic activities -- before that Hong Kong is merely a very poor fishing port. Because the harbour is deep and wide, it protects the ships very well and therefore trading starts to take off. As a result, many Chinese immigrants (mostly illegal) start to come to Hong Kong to find work.
Housing therefore becomes a huge demand. The Hong Kong people simply cannot build houses quick enough. Therefore they need a way to build houses cheap and quickly and efficiently.
There is another problem here -- the lack of water. Today Hong Kong has no water shortage because mainland China supplies river water which is drinkable under a deal between the Chinese and Hong Kong government, China supplies drinkable water to Hong Kong via some big pipes. But the deal was reached in the early 1990s, and before that, Hong Kong always has a water shortage problem. When I was young, there was a year where my family was given 4 hours of water supply every 4 days. You can imagine what life is like when the weather is not favourable.
Without water, no houses can be build. They therefore build houses using sea water, hence "Salty water house". They are unadorned because they are supposed to be cheap houses. The houses do not need to be protected from the salty air, because they are made out of salty water anyway.
Today we find that salty water houses do not last long, and we need to tear them down. They usually start to have structural problem about 20-30 years down the road. But in Macau there are still many of them. You need to understand that up to a few years ago before they open up the gambling industry to foreign ownership, Macau is a very poor place."
I mentioned this to husband Step who worked in Key West. He pointed out that in Key West they used the local sand--full of salt--as aggregate and had the same problems. However, the old Flagler railroad bridges used only huge masses of concrete, no rebar, so no corroding problem.
More housing structures, one painted, two not. I found the diversity in how the porches were adorned fascinating.
And from Anthony: Our living space here is much smaller compared to the western world, some of these flats you see are less then 400 sq ft. So what you see here is that, the people living here pays some money and find someone to renovate the balcony and use it as part of the living room as well. You can look at it as extending the flat to include the balcony area. The metal bars are mainly for reinforcement, and also to prevent the kids from falling down to the street while playing. Because everyone finds a different guy to do the job, so every balcony differs. The balcony is not designed to do this, these are all illegal structures (imagine when there is a fire, the fireman cannot rescue you through the balcony) but the government is not doing anything about it, there are too many of these. It has also happened before that someone put a washing machine on the balcony and the balcony fell down altogether. It must be a heavy machine.
Shopping...And many, many thanks Anthony for your fascinating input!
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