Forget stray cats, Mr Tsang, slap a tax on HK's empty flats

Donald Tsang Yam-kuen said some mighty curious things in his policy address on Wednesday.

I'm not talking about his promise to 'examine with relevant groups ways to facilitate the adoption of stray cats' - although that was pretty strange. No, I mean the astonishing figures Tsang gave right at the start of his speech when he was talking about Hong Kong's housing stock.

The numbers certainly made Jake van der Kamp sit up and pay attention. He devoted a whole column in yesterday's paper to them. I normally wouldn't want to pick up on Jake's sloppy seconds, but Tsang's figures were remarkable enough to justify a second look.

Tsang said there were currently 2.35 million households in Hong Kong and that the city's housing stock consisted of 2.6 million 'residential units'. That would mean Hong Kong has 250,000 more homes than the city needs.

Actually, when you tot up all the latest data, the surplus comes to 228,000 flats. Even so, you still end up wondering why Hong Kong is suffering from such an acute housing shortage.

Over the last five years, the number of households has been growing by an average 27,400 a year. So if all building halted tomorrow, Hong Kong would have enough spare homes to meet demand for the next eight years.