LET ME SAY first that I have some sympathy for the plight of Ho Choi-wan. She is 73 years old, receives an Old Age Allowance of HK$705 a month and her only other source of income to pay off a monthly rental of HK$2,110 for her public housing flat is the HK$8,000 a month her son makes as a lorry driver.
I also have a question for her. Ms Ho, were you acting entirely on your own initiative in the lawsuit you launched last week to make the Housing Authority reduce your rent or did a public housing tenants lobby pick you as their candidate? Just asking but I think other people would also find it interesting to know.
Ms Ho's complaint, which we described at greater length on our front page on Sunday (Woman, 73, launches rent challenge) is that average rents in public housing are meant to be 10 per cent of average household income but the ratio is now higher for her housing estate because the Housing Authority continues to defer a rent review.
A subsidiary complaint is obviously that this is an overall ratio but the actual ratio for her and her son is 24 per cent, just under the 25 per cent at which rent relief kicks in.
We shall leave this aside for the moment. There are plenty of people in Hong Kong whose housing costs are more than 24 per cent of income. Of more importance is this matter of whether the overall 10 per cent limit has been breached. It has become a general complaint among public housing tenants who claim that their incomes have dropped with the economic slowdown while their rents have not.
Let me note that this has yet to be proved. The evidence in support of it is anecdotal while the hard figures on changes in nominal wages and public housing rents indicate that nothing of the kind has occurred.
The real point at issue here, however, is that sympathy for Ms Ho (a perfect candidate for a test case, which is why I asked my first question) might lead us to brand the Housing Authority a bunch of heartless bureaucrats who should immediately reduce rents.