No land, no time and no room to fail: will Carrie Lam deliver on housing, where past Hong Kong leaders fell short?

With last two chief executives criticised for not tackling land shortfall, current administration is urged to cut through red tape and inaction

Issues to take on include rallying various agencies and streamlining procedures

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Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam is under increasing pressure to solve the city’s notorious land shortage in what many see as a dubious legacy left by her predecessors. Illustration: Perry Tse

Published: 8:04am, 23 Jan 2019Updated: 1:16pm, 23 Jan 2019

For more than two decades, Hong Kong has been stuck between moaning about the crash of the property market and agonising over unaffordable home prices.

Take former chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen for example. Rising from the gloom of a major crash that hit the city around 1998, he – while still chief secretary – helped prop up prices by launching a series of measures in 2002, slashing the supply of affordable housing massively and limiting land supply for new homes.

By late 2011, Tsang’s penultimate year as city leader, prices had skyrocketed to such an unaffordable level that he lamented the way it had all turned out.

“Frankly, we have made mistakes,” he said on a radio show. “We have stopped working on a series of things, including producing new land.”

Now, a newly published report summarising almost a year’s work by a government-appointed task force strives to make clear what needs to be done, once and for all.

“Land creation ... should be undertaken in a sustained manner and free from external factors such as the economic cycles,” the Task Force on Land Supply said in its report published on December 31.