Elderly, sickly and facing eviction for low use: a Hong Kong public housing resident’s plight
Eager to recover as many flats as possible given the city’s housing crunch, authorities adopt more aggressive tactics but questions of fairness raised
Chan Shui-king never thought she would have to go flat hunting at the age of 72.
Chan, who suffers from depression and is on medication, is outraged the Housing Authority will kick her out of her public flat in Ngau Tau Kok next January after finding she had abnormally low water and electricity usage.
Since losing her husband to colorectal cancer soon after moving into the flat four years ago, Chan said she has been spending a lot of time at her children’s homes taking care of her grandchildren, causing the low utility consumption.
“I have no income and nowhere else to live,” a tearful Chan said. “Is the government really going to treat an elderly person like this?”
The authority’s panel that reviewed her case and ultimately rejected her appeal said its records showed no water usage for 53 days from August to October and six days of no electricity usage.
Chan is caught in the middle of the city’s housing crisis: as the government struggles with a dire shortage of land, wait lists for public flats lengthen, property prices keep rising and cases of underuse are being pursued.
The government already said it would only have enough land to build around 95,000 public flats in the city by 2020, or 34 per cent of its 10-year target of 280,000 units.
With applicants facing an average wait of 4.5 years, the authority is trying hard to make the most of supply by recovering flats.
Roughly 1 per cent, or about 7,000 units, of all existing public rental flats are recovered each year due to tenant deaths, housing abuse cases and those moving into purchased subsidised flats, data showed.
But the authority considered this rate, which has plateaued in the past five years, to be “too low”.
Stanley Wong Yuen-fai, chairman of the authority’s subsidised housing committee, said it was looking at adding staff to conduct more housing abuse inspections.
And under a revamped policy, wealthy tenants will have to vacate their flats as early as next October if their monthly income exceeds the entry limit by five times or if their net assets exceed the limit by 100 times.
This is very much based on fairness
“This is very much based on fairness,” Wong said, adding that “those who are most in need” are prioritised amid scarce resources.
Chau Kwong-wing, a housing policy expert at the University of Hong Kong, said the recovery rate could increase to 2 per cent if the government scrapped its Tenants Purchase Scheme allowing public housing residents to buy flats at some estates at a heavy discount.
“Once these are sold, they will not come back to the government inventory,” Chau said.
Both Chau and Wong said the policy changes represented improvements.
Wong claimed that if after adding resources and implementing further measures the government could not raise the recovery rate, then at least the authority would feel confident there were not “as many well-off tenants or abusers as we had predicted”.
Anthony Chiu Kwok-wai, executive director of the Federation of Public Housing Estates, said cases such as Chan’s underscored the need for policy to be administered with care and flexibility, with alternatives to eviction possibly considered, including relocation to another public flat.
Chan, who hopes to seek legal help, said she was at a loss as to where to go if forced to move out.
“I don’t want to be a burden to my children,” she added.
Perhaps ironically, her most likely fate is to reside in the government’s interim housing – until she gets allocated a public housing flat again.
