The brave residents of the Gasing Hills area keep up their fight against development on Gasing Hill by handing in a memorandum to DBKL reminding them why it’s a horrendously bad idea with ramifications that could cost thousands of lives – it would be negligence tantamount to murder. Malaysiakini carried the story first and also has a good video featuring interviews with community representatives.

Incindentally Malaysiakini named the developers as ‘Tetuan Gasing Meridian,’ whereas the NST still stuck with ‘Sanctuary Gasing.’ If my research is correct, neither exist, according to the Companies Commission.

They also carried something the NST curiously left out: representative Edward Lee went so far as to suggest that should they fail to get DBKL to stop all overtures to development, the residents associations and committees may undertake a national campaign to raise funds to actually buy over the land from the developers. There is an air of nobility and determination to this idea; I would recommend however that the residents think this option over carefully.

From what I can tell, the people who own this land have been extremely desperate to develop it because they have already lost a lot of money on it, and stand to lose a lot more. I did a fair bit of research into the history of of this area, including when it was bought over by Gasing Meridian and all the problems they’ve had – stretching back as far as a decade or more – in trying to create a yield from their investment.

From what I could tell, these developers/property owners have truly been struggling to get a yield from the millions upon millions they have invested in this because the land is in essence undevelopable.

Should the residents somehow raise the funds to buy over the land, what are they going to do with it? The developers will get a freakingly fat Christmas present free of charge, the residents will be saved (which is good) from a calamity that they should not have been subjected to in the first place, and most importantly:

Suggesting that the residents would go so far as to raise money to buy over the land will only encourage both the developers and DBKL to continue with their scare tactics and keep threatening to build on that land. After all, they have everything to gain (that big fat cheque that they will have basically extorted from the rakyat) and nothing to lose (they won’t end up having to build anything, nor murder anyone).

Tags: Government Appropriation, Local Government // 1 Comment »