My Take | Small-house policy has become a right to print money
- The scheme is open to abuse with many recipients no longer living in their New Territories village. Perhaps future beneficiaries should be required to live in the small houses they build
The small-house policy, responsible for the rapid and incoherent growth of three-storey villas across the New Territories, has little to recommend it. But for most of my first decade in Hong Kong, it provided me with a home.
The 700 sq ft flats, each occupying one floor, provided relatively spacious accommodation at a reasonable rent – at least in terms of Hong Kong’s prohibitively expensive housing market.
But even then, in the 1990s, I could see there were drawbacks. My preference was always to find a flat with a view. This was not difficult in Mui Wo at the time. But at some point during the two-year lease, that view would be blocked by a newly built house. Time to move. The pattern repeated itself frequently.
At one point, I rented an isolated house on a hillside. It came with a little garden. Surely, this would be free of the small-house building boom. Then someone called and said they were inspecting the garden because they had a right to build a house in it!
The small-house policy, introduced in 1972 to tackle squatter problems, has long been controversial. It allows male indigenous villagers of the New Territories to each build a house on land owned by themselves or the government. There is either no land premium or payment at a concessionary rate.
Indigenous villagers are those who can trace their male ancestry back to residents of the New Territories in 1898 when the area first became part of Hong Kong.