Jake's View | Why don’t we convert prime waterfront land at Hong Kong’s shrinking port into housing?
Hong Kong has three square kilometres of prime waterfront land available for housing, all with superb roads built in, if only we recognise that our city’s port is hanging on by the barest of policy threads.
Would you live in a flat in Hong Kong with panoramic sea views, but have your home built on an 80-metre podium above one of the world’s busiest container terminals? - SCMP, November 17
No, of course you wouldn’t, which is, of course, exactly the answer that the Task Force on Land and Supply wishes you to give, when it asks you that question in a consultation scheduled for next March.
To the task force’s way of thinking, the container port is an absolutely integral part of Hong Kong’s economy. If we therefore wish to build housing on the site, then we will either have to build it over the port facilities or move the port, which would be very troublesome and costly, and we don’t want that.
Thus, says the task force without quite saying it, tell us to put a big X on this deal of housing at the container port.
But what if the future does not give us much prospect of a continued big international container port?
The question is a good one, because the port’s future hangs by the thin thread of one outdated policy rule that Beijing has under review.