Hong Kong protesters on meeting their housing dreams: yes, thank you, but we want genuine universal suffrage too
- While Beijing has singled out housing issues as the root of the unrest in Hong Kong, an intricate web of other problems may have to be addressed
- Stories of protesters reflect that meeting all five demands may not end the impasse
The graffiti sprayed across a concrete barrier at a road in Kowloon’s Wong Tai Sin residential district declared: “7K for a house like a cell and you really think we out here scared of jail?”
At an underpass in Central, a message scrawled on the wall read: “12K for 120 sq ft and you think that’s OK?”
In a city roiled by unrest for more than three months, those lines might suggest that deep unhappiness with Hong Kong’s acute housing shortage and impossibly high property prices lie behind the unending, increasingly violent anti-government protests.
That, indeed, is a conclusion drawn by state-backed media on the mainland.
On September 13, the official Xinhua news agency and the People’s Daily, as well as the hardline Global Times tabloid simultaneously singled out unaffordable housing as a “root cause” of the protests in Hong Kong.
The Xinhua commentary went on to say that an underlying cause of the social unrest was the inability of young Hongkongers and those in the lower-income group to share in the city’s economic success.