Letters | More public housing only solution to Hong Kong’s housing woes

I’m writing to express my opinion on Hong Kong’s housing crisis. The price of housing is increasing, and Hong Kong was recently named the world’s most unaffordable housing market for the 11th year in a row. The main reason is the failure of Hong Kong’s housing policy.

Meanwhile, income inequality is a significant problem in Hong Kong. The city’s Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, was 0.539 in 2017. This means there is a huge disparity in wealth and living standards between a small plutocracy and the majority of the population.

The poor cannot afford to rent private housing and can only wait for public housing or temporarily live in subdivided flats, which are tiny and of low quality. Even the rent of “cage homes” is expensive.

While the government owns all the land in Hong Kong, only around 7 per cent of this land is zoned for housing. As the disputes over persistent land issues in the New Territories and the Lantau Tomorrow reclamation project drag on, the housing problem will also continue.