If Hong Kong’s housing targets seem too good to be true, it’s because they are

The government’s rose-tinted projections of public flat numbers are not supported by the actual pace of construction and cannot relieve the city’s severe housing crunch. Worse, they take the focus away from the real problem at hand: the shortage of land

4-MIN READ4-MIN

Ryan IpandIris Poon

Published: 9:04am, 19 Feb 2019Updated: 12:34pm, 19 Feb 2019

Many grass-roots citizens in the affluent city of Hong Kong are struggling in shoebox-like living conditions. Queuing for public housing is like waiting for Godot – it takes 5½ years on average and that figure is growing, while the number of households living in inadequate housing, including subdivided flats, has risen to a staggering 116,600. The lag in the supply of public housing is one of the main culprits.

What is worrisome is that the lag in public housing supply is getting worse. It is true that the government has pledged to increase the ratio of public housing from 60 to 70 per cent of total housing supply, as stated in the latest annual progress report on Hong Kong’s long-term housing strategy.

This should mean we will see 126,000 public housing units in the supply pipeline over the next four years to 2023. However, this target is not matched by the progress report’s own forecast of completed flats, which suggest that only 73,700 more flats would be built, which would be more than 40 per cent lower than the supply target.