Opinion | Hong Kong’s housing crisis can’t wait for long-term solutions

The official pitch is that the project is a long-term solution, designed to deal with Hong Kong’s expanding population and to relieve the city of its land shortages. All’s fair and noble, but we must take a stern look at the stark reality.

The reality is, the Hong Kong poor can wait no longer. Not everyone has the luxury to afford waiting it out for the promised public housing.

Not the single mothers struggling to raise their children as they prepare their dinners next to overflowing toilets. Not families dependent upon a single, paltry salary as they wait in the never-ending queues for public housing. Not the 210,000 people living in 93,000 subdivided homes in 2018.

Nearly three per cent of Hong Kong’s population reside in physically hazardous, socially exclusionary, and mentally debilitating conditions.

The physical dangers extend from dire fire safety regulations (particularly in flats converted from abandoned industrial units, such as ones in Kwun Tong and To Kwa Wan) to horrifyingly minimal sanitation standards – up to 21 tenants would share a single toilet. Summers would bring 40 degree Celsius heat to the ramshackle apartments, while the winters would leave tenants shivering in the cold.