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Hong Kong's first jail designed to meet green building standards has ignited a firestorm over the perception that the government is putting the needs of prisoners over impoverished citizens.
The US $200 million facility sporting a green roof, solar panels, and enhanced indoor air quality, will house roughly 1,400 female inmates. It recently won a green building award, eventually leading to a critical newspaper editorial and public outrage, AFP reported.
"It just doesn't make sense to me," reader Jefference Tay wrote in a letter sent to the South China Morning Post, which ran an editorial with the headline: "Green prison shows failings in our priorities."
"I have been to several public housing estates in Hong Kong which have long, dark and airless corridors. Most of the units are extremely small," Tay wrote. "It is sad that the government has no long-term urban planning strategy."
According to AFP, Hong Kong, one of the world's wealthiest cities, also suffers from a residential property shortage, which has pushed housing prices well beyond the reach of many. As a result, multiple families often squeeze into tiny flats or set up what the newspaper called "cage homes" -- rented metal cages, big enough to store a mattress, pushed into aged tenement flats.
A spokesman for the Hong Kong Architectural Services said the environmentally friendly features at the Lo Wu Correctional Institute cost less than 1 percent of the project's overall cost.
Quick to judge, quick to
Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.
What the angry people clearly don't recognize is that energy and resource savings benefit us all. It's not "their" water or "my" water; it's OUR water. It's not "their" atmosphere, it's OUR atmosphere, OUR Earth. And what benefits a community more directly benefits the people of that community or city or country. Aside from the clear financial and resource savings, if a by-product of "good design" is cleaner indoor air that happens to be breathed by prison guards and inmates alike, is that a bad thing?
Flip it around. Would people rejoice if this municipal building were *knowingly* built to inferior standards, designed to use MORE energy, emit more GHGs, use MORE water and cost MORE to operate? (Today, we know better). Further, if it became moldy a few months after construction and made occupants sick, would we celebrate this? Taking a purely financial look at it, this would result in increased medical costs in addition to the increased operational costs for the building. (And that's before counting the cost of any retrofits to remove the 'mistakes').
Eventually, some day in the distant future, I hope there will be no distinction for "green" or "LEED Certified" buildings, compared with all the rest. It'll just be "good" design vs. poor/bad/old design. Isn't that what we're trying to do here?
People need to be educated.
Sustainable buildings do not
Sustainable buildings do not necessarily mean 5-star hotel caliber living for the inmates. The benefit of efficiency and broader sustainability metrics for buildings are capitalized in energy consumption, waste management, footprint reduction, etc. Just because the prison saves money on the electric bill every month does not mean that the prisoners are swimming in pools of champagne.