Quicker pace appeal on public housing
The new government should raise the annual construction target of public rental housing by 10,000 flats - to 25,000 - to shorten the waiting list, says an adviser to chief executive-elect Leung Chun-ying.
It should also increase provision of different housing and care facilities for the elderly, who will make up a quarter of the city's population in two decades, another adviser says.
Their comments came as Leung yesterday reiterated the need to restructure the housing bureau to solve the problems of grass-roots classes.
Michael Choi Ngai-min (pictured), the Housing Authority member who helped Leung draft his platform, said last week that he forecast the number of applications for public rental housing, standing at 175,900 in December, would hit 200,000 by next year - a 20-year high.
'It is an alarming increase,' Choi said.
'I am afraid the Housing Authority is facing a mounting challenge to keep up its pledge to allot applicants a flat within three years.'
Partly because of rocketing rents in the private sector, the number of applications is growing more rapidly, by more than 15 per cent in each of the past two years.
The authority has two sources of rental flats: each year, it tries to build 15,000 rental homes; and it recovers about 9,000 flats from existing tenants who move out for different reasons.
While Leung has vowed to extend the three-year pledge - so that it covers the 30,000 non-elderly single people on the waiting list, who are older than 35 and typically low-wage workers living in subdivided flats, as well as the 80,000 family applicants - he did not give any time frame for this in his platform.
Choi said the annual construction target for the next few years should rise to 25,000 flats. This construction rate would allow single people to be covered by the three-year pledge, and also cover a 12 per cent growth rate in overall applications.
But with land for construction hard to find, officials should also boost supply by encouraging existing, well-off tenants to return their flats, he said. Last year, there were 24,000 such tenants required to pay extra rent, but only about 770 homes were recovered from them.
Another adviser and former deputy director of housing, Marco Wu Moon-hoi, said a carrot-and-stick approach was needed to encourage wealthy tenants to leave.
'It is important to stimulate the circulation because even if you keep building new flats, you cannot clear the queue.
'A good policy should have a revolving door for tenants, making the housing programme sustainable. We once had the carrot but it is now missing,' Wu said.
The carrot was an adequate supply of subsidised homes for sale under the Home Ownership Scheme (HOS), which was resurrected only last year after being suspended in 2003. The scheme had recovered 200,000 rental homes in 30 years, equivalent to the number of flats in 40 rental housing estates.
Choi went further to suggest restoring other 'carrots', such as interest-free loans and mortgage subsidies for tenants of public rental homes to buy second-hand HOS flats, policies that were scrapped in 2002 along with the HOS.
Without the aids, the secondary HOS market has been inactive, with a turnover of about 2,000 apartments per year, out of a total of 255,000 tradable flats.
Both Wu and Choi said these financial aids should only be offered when there was enough overall supply in the market.
