The Hongfa Building (宏发大厦), built in the 1990s mainly as a car parking building with ground floor eateries popular with bus drivers and passengers from the nearby city bus terminal and coach area, is a great example of the sort of creative re-use and adaptation that characterises the nearby Liuyun Xiaoqu and other communities. In the nearby communities the formerly staid, gated and 100% residential compounds have been converted to a network of thriving and attractive publicly accessible pedestrian pathways and plazas, with shops and businesses installed at the ground floor, perimeter walls removed, and cars largely excluded.
The Hongfa Building takes this successful 'mixed use' model to another level, literally. Most of the upper floors of the building were car parking lots in 2013, but by 2020 more than half have been converted to commercial uses. If walking around inside the building feels somewhat claustrophobic it's because a range of offices, businesses, and training centres (including some maker/electronics-training places) have been shoehorned into what was formerly a car parking area. The result is that what can seem like a mazelike network of passageways and levels provides a rich addition to the community, with a regular flow of people attending courses and using what would otherwise be a waste of space (car parking) in such a transit-rich area of the city.
In addition to the impressive car-parking conversion, which could serve as a model for many other buildings which have wasted too much space on car parking in the area, the Hongfa Building has made full use of the roof. When built in the 1990s the roof included a small plaza on the east and west sides, which was open to the public. In 2007 the rooftop plaza on the west was converted to a basketball court, and the eastern plaza landscaping and greening was upgraded. in 2015 the building facade was upgraded and the roof surface (outside the plaza and basketball court) re-paved. In late 2015 another basketball court was added, in the northwest corner of the roof. This was closely followed in 2016 by the installation of 5 more multipurpose sports courts on the roof, so that the entire rooftop is now an impressive, publicly accessible (though requiring a booking to use the courts) addition to the scarce stock of sporting fields in the city centre.
Meanwhile back at the ground floor, the canteen remains much as it was in the 1990s, still popular with taxi and bus drivers though the canteen customers now are more likely to be food delivery drivers grabbing a quick bite. The western side of the building is a pick-up area for coach passengers with the absence of shade meaning most prefer to wait inside, which is also where the stairs are.
Hats off to the Hongfa Building as a truly multifunctional asset now far surpassing its humble beginnings as a car park.