[fragmede]

The HSBC building in 1935 is considered Hong Kong's first skyscraper, but the boom didn't come until after WWII, but so the real question is how hasn't this happened before in the past ninety years? Sheer luck, or something else?

[xwolfi]

After the protests in 2019 many people left for the UK and we have a shortage of unskilled labor - from bus drivers to construction workers. We have lots of school closures, a population decrease and immigrants are traditionally higher skilled (needed a master degree + 20k HKD minimum salary myself to be allowed in).

So, recently (to your question), we had to import labor from the mainland rather urgently, without maybe checking too much who these people are. There's also a huge property downturn since everyone sold their flats to live large in England, so the amount landlords are ready to pay for renovation decreased a lot. It's possible these factors explain together why they had a crap contractor and the contractor had crap labor ?

We'll see in the coming days how many such renovation sites are affected by subpar fire proofing since now everyone is whining about their own building and the government is auditing everyone, and see if it's a wide spread issue or just by "chance" that this building was the only one potentially affected.

[rasz]

Quick googling shows big fire in Kowloon in 1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Garley_Building_fire just one building with 41 deaths and 81 injuries.