My Take | The forced necessity of Hong Kong's current housing target

Hong Kong's housing problem has been described as an unending crisis. It may well be at the root of our social discontent. The housing policies of the previous two chief executives are rightly considered failures. So it's left to successor Leung Chun-ying to play catch-up. But is he doomed to failure, too?

First chief executive Tung Chee-hwa promised a supply of 85,000 new flats a year. That was widely regarded as disastrous. Yet Leung's current target of 480,000 new flats over the next 10 years mirrors Tung's early promise, though it's slightly less ambitious.

However, Tung's target was not a failure as conventionally believed. Where Tung failed was his effective abandonment of it by 2001 and suspension of the Home Ownership Scheme, which ran from 1977 to 2003 and is only now being relaunched.

Economist Leo Goodstadt has argued, rightly, that the reform momentum of the 1997 housing policy was a success, so much so that it actually relieved, by 2002, some major housing problems inherited from the Brits:

• The waiting time for a public housing flat was reduced from seven years to three.
• Families classified as "inadequately housed" dropped from 170,000 to 100,000.
• About 68,000 households from derelict resettlement estates and 12,600 households from temporary housing areas (THAs) were rehoused in more modern units. And all THAs were finally cleared.
• By 2002, 2.1 per cent of public housing tenants lived in crowded units, compared with a previous figure of 8.4 per cent.