Too valuable to misuse
Urban density and the quality of our city planning has pretty much been determined by the way the government sells land at auction and collects premiums on its usage and density. The overriding tendency inside the Housing, Planning and Lands Bureau is to get as much for this precious resource as possible. That's a good thing if you need money for infrastructure for a thriving metropolis, but it is a bad thing if you want sound planning and a higher quality of urban life.
Recently, two incidents have shown just how little our politicians understand this process. A public consensus has formed over the past few years that we suffer from too much urban density and enjoy too little urban open space. The government's practice of squeezing as much money out of our limited land resources perpetuates this problem.
And yet, our legislators, who should know better, have decided to make decisions about two policies concerning our urban environment regardless of the facts. The first is the Democrats' mysterious position on the proposed new government headquarters at the Tamar site.
Bizarrely, the party finds itself allied with the rotten boroughs - the functional constituencies - which support the proposal. The Democrats meekly qualified their position with a warning to government planners to limit the density of the project.
But would any government employee fail to try to maximise what he or she could get for some of the choicest property in Hong Kong, especially after the hysterical criticism levelled at the grant of free land to Henderson Land's Grande Promenade project? Would the politicians have forgiven the lost revenue had the grant been used to build a park?
The fact is that even if the government built a headquarters alone - with no additional private commercial space - it would increase both density and traffic to unsustainable levels in Wan Chai, Admiralty and Central. The higher density would naturally support the government's case for another ugly road on our precious waterfront.
Is that what the politicians want?
The second, and more annoying, case is politicians' critical reaction to a recent article in the Post after it was discovered that many developers had reaped handsome returns from the government policy of exempting green spaces from those big premiums they pay. The policy provides an incentive to build flats with balconies and provide more open spaces for residents.
This green policy actually limited the government's obsession with maximising revenue from land sales. In adopting the policy, it took a small step towards treating land as a planning, as opposed to a revenue, issue. The government backtracked somewhat on this scheme recently when it rejected developers' requests to combine the balcony spaces with utility platforms, so that balconies could be increased in size. So the vapid criticism from politicians is undermining a helpful trend towards increasing the quality of our urban living spaces.
As long as the government raises revenue from land, the overwhelming tendency will be to maximise, maximise, maximise. What politicians do not seem to understand is that this will not change in any significant way if they continue to demand good planning with less density and maximised land revenue. The policy to maximise won't change until the system is reformed fundamentally, from the ground up. That means getting government out of the land business. This is a tall order, to be sure, and one that would require courageous political vision.
So we can rule it out for now.
Supporting increased density in Tamar, and undermining the green-spaces policy, just shows that lawmakers - sadly including those in the Democratic Party - have a long way to go before the public can take them seriously as responsible community leaders.
Douglas George Anderson is a journalist and consultant in Hong Kong
