Blame American rebels for Hong Kong’s housing mess
But also blame the intransigence of policymakers and bureaucrats who don’t want to go to the trouble of real change
More than half of the city’s large-scale private housing projects approved by the authorities in the past 25 years were never built due to a combination of bureaucratic red tape and developers drawing out the application process, a university study has found.
SCMP, January 13
Back in 1776 the British government had to confront a fiscal dilemma. How do you make colonies pay for their own defence, a big bill at the time in America, if they rebel when you impose taxes on them?
The solution that the bureaucrats in Whitehall adopted, too late to forestall that rebellion in America, was to claim government ownership of all land in Britain’s colonies and then sell it back to the colonists on long-term leases to cover the cost of administration.
It has proved such a lasting idea that we still have it in Hong Kong today. Blame America. Blame one country, two systems, for preventing any change since 1997.
The problem in Hong Kong’s circumstances is that to put up a new residential development you must pay billions at auction for the land, risk billions more in construction and finance costs, and not see any return on your money for three years or more while you hope the market does not crash on you.