To solve Hong Kong’s housing crisis, there are only two viable options

Mike Rowse says the only workable solutions to the lack of land for housing are for Hong Kong to reclaim land and make use of developers’ extensive bank of agricultural plots. All other options, such as country park development, yield too little land to be worth the trouble

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Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. Hong Kong’s task force on land supply needs to drag public attention back to identifying areas for possible reclamation. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:00am, 22 Apr 2018Updated: 6:11pm, 22 Apr 2018

Nobody seems entirely sure exactly how much more land Hong Kong needs to address its serious housing shortfall. Various numbers of hectares have been quoted, but are immediately challenged as being inadequate. So let’s just take as our starting position that we need to find a hell of a lot more developable land.

In one way, that may seem to make the job of the Task Force on Land Supply extremely challenging. But, paradoxically, it could help to simplify identifying the best ways forward. For there are really only two acceptable ways to make land available on the scale required: reclamation; and developing the extensive areas of agricultural land in the New Territories.

First, the background.

Our housing situation is desperate, some aspects of it are even scandalous. Nearly 210,000 people are crammed into tiny subdivided units, some in industrial buildings. Meanwhile, our property developers are putting flats of 200 sq ft or even less on the market.

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