If Hong Kong’s housing targets seem too good to be true, it’s because they are
- The government’s rose-tinted projections of public flat numbers are not supported by the actual pace of construction and cannot relieve the city’s severe housing crunch. Worse, they take the focus away from the real problem at hand: the shortage of land
This should mean we will see 126,000 public housing units in the supply pipeline over the next four years to 2023. However, this target is not matched by the progress report’s own forecast of completed flats, which suggest that only 73,700 more flats would be built, which would be more than 40 per cent lower than the supply target.
In fact, the shortfall will probably exceed this figure, because the government has already missed the target set four years ago for public housing flats. Its long-term housing strategy, announced in 2014, set a 10-year target of 290,000 public housing flats from 2015, which means an average of 29,000 flats a year. If evenly spread, Hong Kong would have had 116,000 new public flats in the four years to 2019.
But again, the government forecast was much lower than the target, and the actual number of completed flats lower still. The government projected a supply of only 77,800, and the completed number of flats, according to the Housing Authority, was 70,400 flats. This means a shortfall of nearly 40 per cent over the forecast.
The government has often claimed that public housing supply would be more abundant further down the line, despite it falling short in the immediate future, but is this really the case? Compared with the official 10-year public housing supply target of 290,000 flats, the forecast of completed units (based on Housing Authority figures and a forecast by Our Hong Kong Foundation) is only 192,200, some 34 per cent lower than the target.
Further evidence suggests that the lag in the supply of public housing is unlikely to improve in the foreseeable future. Though the government said in its long-term housing strategy report that it had identified land to build an additional 11,000 units, in reality, 10,600 of these units are tied to the nine plots of land that were rezoned from private to public housing. Elsewhere, the government has made little progress in identifying land.
To raise the plot ratio, the government also needs the consent of the Town Planning Board, which would lengthen the planning process and thus slow supply. It is possible that delays in the completion of public housing will become more serious. Raising the plot ratio is a stopgap measure, as the root of the problem is the shortage of land, and the real solution is to increase supply.
Speed is of the essence, so it is important that we explore and support different ways to make land available, while measures like rezoning and developing new areas are also important to redress land shortages in the next 10 years.
Ryan Ip is head of land and housing research, and Iris Poon is a researcher, at Our Hong Kong Foundation