Hong Kong experts complain that they lack information when asked to decide on housing projects
Town planning experts say people are not given enough data to make informed choices about whether new flats should be built in their areas
When Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying gave his policy address earlier this month, he told Hongkongers to "make the right choice" in meeting the city's housing goals. But the question is: do citizens have the facts required to decide between the homes they need and the better environment they crave?
Urban planners say the government's lack of transparency in preventing the public from knowing the real price they will pay for building more flats in crowded urban districts to reach the city's housing target of 480,000 new homes in a decade.
When people are asked to support more housing projects, they are often poorly informed about how much open space is left in a particular district, whether they will face heavy traffic as a result of the development and whether they will need to turn on their air-conditioners more often as the temperature rises amid denser living environments.
"Whether adding more flats is acceptable should be discussed in the local context and it requires data. Each district faces different problems," said University of Hong Kong urban planning expert Dr Ng Cho-nam. "It is already a global trend that governments like the United Kingdom open up all planning data for public use."
For example, statistics about the shortfall or surplus of open space are not readily available online. One has to go through a lengthy Town Planning Board paper to find out how much open space is left in a district.
Take Kwai Chung for example, where two green open spaces were lost for the construction of 800 public rental flats last year. The government must, under planning guidelines, provide 32 hectares of open space in the area. Only 12 hectares is available, but the planning board paper says - without providing a timeline - that 35 hectares will be provided in future.