Opinion | To lift Hong Kong’s mood, use 1 per cent of green belt land to build a new town with 500,000 affordable homes

In Hong Kong, significantly more land is designated for parks and green belts than in Singapore. If just a small fraction is given over to affordable flats, it might be enough to sweep the city off its current path of destruction

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Published: 6:45am, 28 Sep 2019Updated: 8:12am, 28 Sep 2019

Hong Kong is going through a deep cultural identity crisis for which there is no silver bullet. Tackling the biggest social issue will hopefully lessen social discontent and smooth the way forward.

For this purpose, Hong Kong needs to build a satellite town of 500,000 affordable homes quickly to defuse the present political crisis and alleviate the long-term housing shortage.

Behind Hong Kong’s political crisis is a series of socio-economic problems which need to be addressed. High property prices, income inequality, barriers to upward mobility and an uneasy relationship with mainland China are underlying drivers of the recent protests. Although wealth inequality is becoming a global problem, the housing crisis is particularly acute in Hong Kong.

In the most expensive city in the world, it takes eight years of a household’s combined unspent income to pay the deposit on a new flat and 21 years to pay it off. This effectively means that a new home on the primary market is practically out of reach for the vast majority of the working population.

If someone wants to move into a public rental flat, he or she has to compete with 270,000 other applicants who have to wait 5 years, five months, since only an average of 15,000 units are built each year.

Those who wish to quickly set up home end up in a subdivided flat, paying a monthly rent of around HK$6,000 (US$765) for a living space of 60 square feet per person.