Jake's View | Hong Kong still has plenty of wasted space to solve its housing woes
The ageing container port, Cyberport, Disney Park, Gleneagles Hospital: flatten the lot and build bigger and more affordable homes
The real embarrassment for Hong Kong is not that statistics have fallen to 2.8 persons per public flat but that in a rich city like Hong Kong the average public housing tenant shares only 142 sq ft of living space … If we want to house our people with more dignity and narrow this gap, we must reclaim more land and build many more and bigger flats. It is as simple as that.
– Nelson Wong, vice-chairman, Business and Professionals Federation of Hong Kong, in SCMP’s “Letters to the editor”, November 15, 2017
He is absolutely right about the crowding. It is an embarrassment for Hong Kong that in one of the world’s richest cities all but a very few people should have to live in shoeboxes. Why have we not done better?
I think this is actually a different question from the one about housing shortages. We still had a serious shortage as late as the 1970s with more than 15 per cent of the population living in squatter shacks.
But only a handful of permanent ID card holders do not now have a formal roof over their heads.
Let’s agree here that our government cannot be responsible for housing everyone who takes a fancy to living in Hong Kong. I sympathise with the miseries of people in sub-divided flats but most are not recognised permanent residents.