If you're middle class, have a good job, have worked half your life and are now ready to buy a home that matches your status, forget it. You won't be able to afford anything that comes even close to your middle-class standing unless you have a long-lost uncle who left you a bundle.
You need a cool HK$10 million for a 691 sq ft flat with actual living space of 400 sq ft at The Icon in Conduit Road. Your HK$10 million will get you two closet-sized bedrooms to squeeze in your wife and children. I wouldn't exactly call Conduit Road an upscale area but it's still too classy for middle-class folks like you.
Lower your sights, as Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen advised some months back. If you look hard enough, you might still find HK$3 million flats in the more remote parts of the New Territories. They're pigeon-hole-sized but a bargain at HK$3 million. Your middle-class family will just have to settle for that as your dream home.
Once you've got your pigeon-hole-sized dream home, your next task is to switch sides. Instead of cursing the government for doing nothing about unaffordable home prices, you have to curse the government for doing something about it. As a homeowner you want the market to remain sizzling hot with speculators, greedy landlords and unscrupulous developers driving up prices. Within a year or two, your HK$3 million pigeon-hole-sized flat could be worth HK$4 million.
That'll make you feel rich, but you'll still be trapped in that tiny flat. That's because larger flats worth HK$4 million when you bought your HK$3 million home will have become HK$5 million. So forget about that HK$10 million cubicle in Conduit Road. With the insane way prices are now climbing, it will be selling for HK$15 million in a few years. You'll never catch up. Don't believe me? Then ask legislative councillor Lee Wing-tat. He earns over HK$60,000 a month as a legislator but told me all he could afford was a modest flat way out in Tuen Mun.
Our government openly gushes with pride every time international surveys name Hong Kong as the world's freest economy. Last week, an international survey named Hong Kong as having the world's priciest property market. Our government didn't gush with pride. In fact, it didn't say anything. Does its silence suggest that having the world's priciest property market is nothing to be proud of? Maybe it is afraid people may think it immoral that it helped home prices reach such heights when it has done nothing about Hong Kong having 1 million poor people.