Hong Kong must tackle long-term problem of building maintenance

There are matters we need to sort out quickly arising from the Tai Po fire tragedy but also systemic issues that need to be tackled if we are to avoid a repeat of the disaster. The fact is that Hong Kong faces two sorts of ageing problems: old buildings and the old people who live in them. Sometimes they overlap. Hong Kong is inevitably a high-rise city, because so many people are crammed into a relatively limited land area. If you can’t build out, you build up. Since we have been developing...