So the government wants us all having night market fun on the harbour, and this week the actual thing everyone in Hong Kong was arguing about got quietly slotted onto a spreadsheet. The Buildings Department's "Basic Housing Units" register, the list meant to flag genuine subdivided flats, turned out to have mainstream private estates sitting on it right next to the old walk-ups. People noticed on social media within a day and started asking the obvious question: since when is my building a subdivided-flat block?

Here's the thing nobody wants to say plainly: a register only works if the label means something. Put a normal private estate on the same list as a partitioned tong lau unit and you haven't flagged a housing problem, you've just told every buyer, tenant, and mortgage bank in that estate that the paperwork doesn't trust the building. Authorities are now stuck explaining a database error to people whose flats didn't change, while the actual subdivided units the register was built to catch get the same shrug they always do. That's the cost of building a compliance list this loosely: you spend the week reassuring homeowners in Kwun Tong and Sha Tin instead of fixing the housing conditions the thing was supposed to expose.