So, you think my landlord hitting me with a 26 per cent rent rise after just one year is greed gone mad? Think again. A reader contacted me to say that what I wrote two weeks ago was nothing - he had been hit with a 40 per cent increase. I asked if his salary had gone up by that much. He laughed, but it was obviously not a joyous one.
I've been doing some of that kind of laughing too, after my initial fury. It is a laugh of resignation, of knowing there is nothing I can do, and of knowing there is a lot our government can do but will not.
I have spent much time cursing Hong Kong's landlords and property developers for whom greed has no boundaries. If one of them would follow Bill Gates in donating his fortune to charity I might be appeased. That is something I suspect will never happen.
But let us not heap all our scorn on the landlords and developers. Yes, they triple your rent in some cases, and they build box-like flats with windows that look out to your neighbour's laundry, marketing them as luxury homes surrounded by lush greenery. But they do this because lax laws let them.
In cursing our developers, we forget that the bureaucrats who rule us created the environment for runaway greed in the property sector. They now talk of releasing more land to cool the market but I have yet to hear them admit they caused the overheating.
Let me remind you of what they did. They dried up land supply for years. And they abruptly ended the government's subsidised home-ownership policy, which had helped steady flat prices. They even left hundreds of already completed home-ownership flats empty to create a shortage. They did all this during an economic downturn in the past decade, when developers and homeowners complained prices dropped too much.
A robust economic recovery coupled with a land scarcity and flat shortage caused prices to top previous records, fanning speculative greed. But the bureaucrats who forced prices up by listening to the developers and homeowners were deaf to the rest of us when homes became unaffordably pricey. It took public anger to reach dangerous levels to force our bureaucrats into several half-hearted measures, which have done little to cool the market.