Opinion

Public Housing Lament

Not being an architect, and speaking from a lay-person’s perspective, I have to wonder at the wisdom behind much of Macau’s newer public housing estates. 
 
Is there a master plan for the city and its sisters Taipa and Coloane?  Is there a method behind the madness of city zoning?
 
It seems to me that subsidized housing is being built in great ghettos – case in point the three vast estates that sit, carved into the Coloane hills, cheek to jowl, isolated at the end of the Cotai strip, built in such high density that the inner blocks promise a rather miserable existence, with their lack of airflow and lack of light.
 
And it can’t have gone un-noticed by those who are gradually moving into these estates that at the other end of the strip high on a hil, stands the luxurious, marble edifice, One Grantai, for those who can afford the HK$10,000 a square foot price tag.  Is there a symbolic splitting of the ‘have’s’ and ‘have not’s’, from one end of Cotai to the other?  
 
What consideration has been given to the psychological effect on people who are herded into these blocks?  A sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’ pervades – second class citizens kept separate from the rest of the community.
 
And then there’s the giant pink and blue wall of an estate that’s been built in central Taipa between the cemetery and the so-called luxury Pacifica Gardens apartments. Like a tsunami wave it looms over the neighbourhood, reducing light and airflow.  Is this another example of segmenting the working class from the well-heeled?  
 
We ought to take note of places like Tin Shui Wan in Hong Kong where there is block after block of nothing but public housing.  Referred to as ‘the sad town’, it has the highest recorded level of suicides, domestic violence, single mothers and drug users in the city.
 
Public housing needs to be better blended into the wider community.  Lessons can be learned from Singapore’s HDB low cost housing developments. In an effort to promote social cohesion, housing of different income groups have been mixed together in estates and new towns.  Most of these estates have an abundance of trees, gardens and community gathering spots, especially for the ‘oldies’, and are much sought after homes.
 
As in Singapore in the 1990s, I’d like to see more government intervention on the upgrading of existing older flats, installing new facilities, waterproofing and painting crumbly old building exteriors, and helping the less advantaged to stay living in the communities they’ve grown up in.
 
And for goodness sakes, let’s have more empathy for those who are now unable to catch the wave of property prices to buy their own homes; not to stereotype, or treat them as pariahs, but to provide more aesthetically pleasing buildings that gives them a sense of pride and a place to call home.
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