Ticking time bomb: just how widespread are Hong Kong’s undetected illegal property renovations?

Illegal renovations on a flat only surfaced after a video was posted online. This raises the question: how many more similarly compromised apartments exist in our expensive and ageing housing market?

Franklin Koo

Published: 8:15am, 3 Jun 2023

Why you can trust SCMP

A house of cards. That might have been what some Lohas Park residents in Tseung Kwan O felt they were living in when they found that a flat owner had carried out illegal modifications on a load-bearing wall.

The discovery that a structural wall had been partially demolished was made by keen-eyed viewers in a video of the renovated flat. If it had not been uploaded onto a property-related channel with over 30,000 subscribers (the video has since been pulled), the illegal modification is likely to have remained hidden.

This raises a point – just how many other similarly compromised flats exist in a housing market that remains one of the world’s most expensive?

Hong Kong’s flats are not only expensive, but 59 per cent of private residential buildings are more than 30 years old. A Legislative Council report found that, at the end of 2019, many of the roughly 35,700 residential buildings were approaching the end of their 50-year working life. A fifth had been built in 1969 or earlier, and another 39 per cent were 30-49 years old.

Ageing flats are a concern as any permanent structural damage affects safety. Other factors such as property valuation and the determination of mortgages and insurance premiums are also affected.

Compromised load-bearing walls will shift the burden to other walls. Overloaded walls can fail, causing building damage. It is only a matter of time before structural failure happens – making it a ticking time bomb. The 2010 To Kwa Wan building collapse at Ma Tau Wai Road is a stern reminder that illegal modifications have serious ramifications.

With such devastating consequences, the elephant in the room is the absence of a mechanism to detect such modifications. Owners are unlikely to report their own illegal work and the problem may never surface until it becomes too late to rectify. Some offenders may wrongly believe that, since the building has not collapsed, it probably never will.

A Buildings Department official inspects the site of the collapsed Chinese tenement “tong lau” at 45 Ma Tau Wai Road in Hung Hom on February 1, 2010. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Most Hongkongers spend their life savings just to be able to afford a home. Often, this will be in multistorey building where owners and tenants have to depend on one other to comply with the law and deploy common sense. Like the Chinese saying, when everyone is on the same boat, we don’t start drilling holes in it.

But common sense is not always common. On a recent flight, while the seat belt sign was on, I counted no less than six passengers getting up to go to the toilet despite in-flight announcements to remain seated. Staying in place when the seat-belt sign is on is for the safety of all passengers. Only half were stopped while the others simply ignored the attendants and rushed into the toilets.

While only a very small minority did this, the point is that it only takes one person to compromise the structural integrity of an entire building. Take the example of a recent flight in South Korea, when one person opened an emergency exit door mid-air and endangered all other passengers.

If people cannot even be trusted to respect straightforward safety rules that are enforced in plain view, trusting everyone in the privacy of their own homes to respect all the building rules may be a little optimistic.

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Aeroplane door opens mid-flight aboard South Korean Asiana jet

In the Lohas Park incident, the different parties involved – at the very least, the homeowner, interior designer and renovation workers – had all failed to point out the significance of a load-bearing wall before commencing demolition work. Even after alterations, staff involved in filming the modifications did not realise the detrimental effect, despite including the original and amended floor plans in the video.

Not all is lost, however. There is a legal framework to deal with the high-density nature of homes, such as providing for the formation of an incorporated owners’ committee for building management and a deed of mutual covenant to set out the rights and obligations of a building.

Owners planning alteration works on their flats are required to ensure they comply with the Buildings Ordinance and its subsidiary legislation. But this provides little comfort next to the question I posed at the beginning.

If no one is able to detect these illegal modifications, could we all be living in a ticking time bomb? If using such strong words can raise awareness to prevent these illegal alterations from recurring, it will be worth it.

Franklin Koo is an accredited mediator, lawyer and author of “Power to the People: Extending the Jury to the Hong Kong District Court”