Henry M.Y.
Second Officer
Flight distance : 11548839 ft
Hong Kong
Offline
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Hi Ste Wong,
This is not an abandoned estate. And there was no sad story behind. Did you recognise the black colour Land Cruser in the photo, the well kept yellow guard booth and blue hoarding boards?
Each of these 2 or 3 storeys houses is actually sitting on strong foundation piles of more than 100 metres deep! These houses are the famous "Ghost Houses" that were built by one of the largest Real Estate Developers in HK, the New World Development Ltd.
According to media - back in the 1990s, NWD bought this piece of village land inexpensively and applied for Planning Permission for building these houses within the then extant land use zoning of Green Belt. The Town Planning Board approved this with time limit beyond which the Planning Permission would expired. As time went by, NWD noticed that the Government was exploring to rezone all the areas into residential district, which would allow the building of multi-storeys high rise apartments.
In trying to take advantage of future prospects, and in order to secure NWD's future claiming of being the owner of houses thereby establishing the rights to re-develop in the future into high-rise buildings for sell in the future, NWD drove in the deep foundation piles and built those houses, discharging the Planning Permission. Those houses were never planned to be sold but were left as-is for the time being, waiting for the Government's rezoning. These houses were designed to be torn down quickly and rebuilt into high-rise apartments without the need of driving in foundation piles again.
These were real business of the Tycoon and it took decades for realising the huge profits.
All we see now are in fact an interim stage of NWD's business.
Henry |
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