How ‘autocratic’ Singapore trumps ‘free’ Hong Kong on true liveability

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A shop owner in Sai Ying Pun displays a paper offering depicting “luxurious” subdivided flats to be burned during this year’s Hungry Ghost festival. A government study in January 2018 found 210,000 people live in subdivided flats in Hong Kong, not including the estimated 40,000 residents of “cage homes”. Photo: Nora Tam

Published: 5:03am, 21 Aug 2018Updated: 5:03am, 21 Aug 2018

Mr David Dodwell is right to call out the bias in the ranking methodologies of many “liveability” studies (“Hong Kong is the place to be – flawed surveys on ‘liveability’ have got it wrong”, August 18)

However, he is just as “blatantly biased” – to quote his self-characterisation on this issue – in glossing over the harsh realities facing the average Hongkonger.

The city’s wealth gap is widening, and this stratification is compounded by the hollowing out of many industries to competitors in the Pearl River Delta region and elsewhere.

Housing remains the most unaffordable in the world, pigeon holes appear to be the growing norm for new property launches. Congestion is rife in many homes, as well as on the streets and pavements of Hong Kong. Air, noise and light pollution are rampant – no thanks in part to an urban planning quirk, which consigns the vast majority of the city’s 7.3 million population to live, work, play and buzz about on around 250 sq km of land, or about a third of Singapore.

Throw in the daily arrivals from the rest of China, and nowhere else in the world can one witness such a concentration camp of homo sapiens living cheek by jowl with the wild boars, Burmese pythons, 240 species of butterfly, and other wildlife that live in the city’s vast and expansive country parks covering a total area that is about 50 per cent more than the sum which has been set aside for human habitation.

While this sharp juxtaposition between the density of a man-made concrete jungle and the spatiality of the natural environment does have its charms, it is of little consolation to those who have to make do with living conditions that are an absolute disgrace to any civilised society, let alone one that proudly calls itself “Asia’s World City”.