Hong Kong to piece together first public ‘pre-made’ housing block this year, as officials vow to cut costs
- Tenants will have to wait until 2025 or beyond to move in, as housing official says site is part of wider public housing projects
- Housing minister Winnie Ho vows to bring down construction costs of pre-made homes through future mass production
Hong Kong will start building its first prefabricated housing block by the end of the year, as officials vowed to lower the project’s long-term construction costs through mass production.
But tenants would have to wait until 2025 or later to move into one of the 200 “pre-made” concrete homes, despite authorities expecting them to be completed in three months, as some 4,600 standard flats would also be built at the same Tung Chung site, Housing Department assistant director Daniel Leung Hung-wai said.
“These flats share the same fire exits so they have to be handed over together,” Leung told reporters touring the Tung Chung Extension Area on Friday.
The standard flats were part of a public housing estate featuring four 40-storey towers set to be built on the reclaimed land, he added.
‘30,000 temporary public flats to be built on 8 sites over 5 years in Hong Kong’
The pre-made flats would form an additional 12-storey block created with the “modular integrated construction” (MiC) technique, which employs free-standing, integrated modules from a mainland Chinese factory that undergo quality inspections before being installed at the project site.
Leung said the Tung Chung project was chosen to trial the pre-made flats since reclaimed land was flatter and more accessible, making it easier to transport and store the modules.
Authorities said they would first move the modules to a 75,300 sq ft area nearby, only beginning construction at the end of 2023 once the site’s underground car park was completed.
The pre-made flats would come in four sizes, ranging from 150 to 390 sq ft and catering to households of up to five people.
Leung said the project would allow authorities to assess the productivity and cost-effectiveness of the modular system, noting such units were 10 per cent more expensive to build than standard flats.
Official figures showed it cost HK$760,000 (US$96,815) to build a public housing flat using the standard construction process.
Secretary for Housing Winnie Ho Wing-yin, who also joined the tour, said the cost could be lower as soon as the government pledged to use MiC more extensively in the future.
“When we start to use the technique for mass production in the future, the cost could be lowered as well,” Ho said.
HK$780 rent for new Hong Kong public flats; 10,000 homes to be built in Kai Tak
Authorities earlier announced plans to build 400 pre-made flats for a 33-storey residential block at Tak Tin Street in Lam Tin by 2027 and another 1,400 for three buildings on Kwun Tong’s Anderson Road by 2024 at the earliest.
The use of the MiC method to create new public housing projects over the next five years and speed up flat production was among proposals floated by Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu last October during his maiden policy address.
Authorities have also said they planned to incorporate the modular construction method into at least half of all public housing projects launching during the second half of the decade.
