Wong Chin Ming Zucchini, watermelons, cherry tomatoes and kale in his greenhouses inspected in a village on the outskong in Hong Kong. He has been collecting here in the place of a once factory for 19 years. His farm will soon be wiped off the card to make room for a massive development, from which China hopes that Hong Kong will be an answer to the Silicon Valley. The government sets 300 square kilometers (116 square miles) for the project, an area that is more than twice as large as San Francisco.
It’s called “Northern metropolis“But for the time being it is anything but. Hong Kong’s hinterland is a Hodgegodge made of sleepy hamlets, apartment blocks and stray dogs. Rusty -fences surrounded warehouses, abandoned cars in bushes and numerous huts that were built to be built that were builtQuarantinePatients sit empty during the Covid 19 pandemy. The northern metropolis will not grow organically for decades, such as the California Tech -Hub near Stanford University or the glittering skyscrapers from Hong Kong, where the company and citizens had enjoyed a greater autonomy of the Communist Party of the Communist Party in the Chinese Partycrackedin 2020.
Real estate developers express privately reservations against investments in the northern metropolis to make enormous financial obligations in relation to a high decline in Hong KongProperty values. Conservationists question the environmental impacts and some residents do not want to leave their home. But with disagreements in Hong Kong, citizens from all areas of life are to change. The government says that the northern metropolis has so far displaced 4,500 households. “If you have to develop this place, we cannot prevent,” says Wong about his farm. “We’ll just take it as it comes.”
The former Hong Kong leader, Carrie Lam, proposed the northern metropolis for the first time in 2021 to increase the land range for development. Beijing had frustrated that houses in the city were the least affordable in the world. The Hong Kong government planned the next few years for the area that makes up a third of the city.
The northern metropolis is being built along the Shenzhen River, which separates Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland and contains seven border crossings. His blueprint divides the development into four zones: technology, logistics, border trade and ecotourism. There will be new subway stations, including a cross-border railway line to Shenzhen, China’s third largest city through gross domestic products. Official plans require buildings with the latest technology companies and research institutions as tenants and a more than doubled population of the area. “As an investment that decides on Hong Kong’s social and economic development, the northern metropolis exceeded the government’s agenda,” says a government’s statement in Hong Kong.
The project has included urgency because the traditional economic pillars of the city,FinanceAndReal estateWhen the tension between China and the West grows, the often contradictory interests of Hong Kong have long been sentbalancing. In view of the growing geopolitical conflicts of the world, “we have to diversify in relation to our economic engines,” says Kathy Lee, the research manager based in Hong Kong at Colliers International Group Inc., a real estate investment company.
The city could align the northern metropolis even more with the mainland and the economic goals of Chinese President Xi Jinping. The city will help the city to further integrate into the Greater Bay Area, a region that includes 11 South Chinese cities, says Lee. According to Carlos Lo, Professor at the School of Governance and Policy Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, it could also be used as a platform as a platform to export high -quality Chinese technologies. Many countries consider the city to be a less threat than the Chinese mainland. “Hong Kong has to find a new model to revive the economy,” he says. “The government cannot return how things were led in the good old days.”
The authorities in Hong Kong await the cityrich familiesto invest in the northern metropolis. In the city, the state has the state and companies buy the right to develop it for a fixed time, usually 50 years. Nobody knows how much northern metropolis will cost. The government set the number in $ 10 billion, but other estimates were much higher.
At a meeting in Shenzhen at the end of last year, Xia Baolong, the top Chinese official Hong Kong, asked a group of Tycoons and managers to take “concrete measures” in order to support the growth of the city and to take part in projects, including the northern metropolis. Steve Tsang, director of a China research center at the SOAS University of London, describes the attitude of Beijing: “If theBusiness elitesFrom Hong Kong, there are no contributions to the economy because Beijing considers it appropriate, there is no reason why they need to be treated well. “
The costly initiative “has an inappropriate time if everyone needs cash”Office rangeshave dropped by 40% since their climax in 2019.
There is another reason why developers may invest unattractive in northern metropolis. The government that faces each otherDeficitsTests the idea of relocating more costs in three invitations to private companies to submit offers. They are responsible for electricity, water pipes and other infrastructures that the government made available earlier.
Real estate companies have expressed concerns about this change, according to people who are familiar with the discussions. According to Patrick Wong, a leading analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, the projects to assess the infrastructure could increase years for projects to evaluate land prices and risks. “It’s a big problem,” says Wong, who expects developers to be careful when submitting offers.
If the local developers have such large investments when companies are weak, Chinese state companies that have more access to cash will have a significant presence in the northern metropolis, says the Jeong from CBRE. The government says that the developer’s feedback could consider and relieve its stress by offering more pay-as-you-Build and other attractive agreements.
“We believe that the trained packages for the market would be of good commercial interest,” says his explanation. About two dozen companies, including the Chinese developers, contractors, conglomerates and an e-commerce logistics company in Hong Kong and Chinese mainland, have expressed interest in the production of offers as part of the process that the government tests. This starts in the second half of this year.
Brian Wong from Liber Research Community, a Think Tank in Hong Kong, questions the environmental costs of the northern metropolis. The area “has many different natural and human landscapes, and it would be a waste if these landscapes are destroyed for a development that does not come too full,” he says. The government says that if possible, it tries to preserve active arable land and turns brachfelder into the fieldsWetlandHabitats; It also promotes sustainable urban agriculture, also on roofs.
Villages in the TA KWU district will be one of the first, the disappearance and the northern metropolis give way. The government wants to make the area attractive for universities. In 2028, construction is scheduled to begin with thousands of new apartments for teachers and students. In Sing Ping, a rural village in the district, which is only 20 minutes away from the Chinese border of the mainland, the residents are concerned. Emerald Lee lived her whole life in a house that her parents built in the 1960s. About 50 families occupy one or two-story houses near fields where they grow their own food.
Although the government will compensate the residents, Lee expects it not to be enough. People who in houses such as their lives can receive compensation of $ 12,816 hk $ per square meter, a tenth of the average price-performance ratio of the area. If your income is low enough, you are entitled to switch to subsidized state apartments. Lee would rather change the government to land nearby. “We lived six or seven decades here,” she says. “Why do you have to force us and replace us with a few different things?”
This story was originally on Fortune.com
