My Take | Hong Kong’s housing woes a result of deal with the devil
Flats are not only getting more expensive, but also smaller; and as the government pushes to build ever more units, quality of life will suffer
An Australian friend of mine who has been in Hong Kong for decades often regrets that he never took the plunge and bought a flat. Otherwise, he would be sitting pretty now. But what stopped him all these years?
“Every time I looked, the same price here would have got me a much bigger house with front and backyards back home,” he said.
Perfectly understandable, but that’s not how real estate works here. In overseas developed economies, at least with cities that have not had a crazy property bubble in the past decade, you are usually rewarded with bigger and better houses as you progress up the economic and career ladder.
Your quality of life, at least at home, improves over time, assuming nothing bad happens to your career.
Not so in Hong Kong; most of us are living in flats not much bigger than the ones we grew up in, even if we have reasonably good jobs. That’s because long ago, the city made a bargain with the devil.