New ‘rural villas’ smack of illegal deals between Hong Kong villagers and developers, research group says
- Smart designs, walled estates, security guards among signs these aren’t village ‘small houses’
- Lands Department says it will look at Liber group’s research into illegal deals in New Territories
More than 800 village houses that sprouted in rural Hong Kong over the past two years might involve illegal deals between villagers and developers, a research group has alleged.
The “small houses” were built under a colonial policy dating to 1972, which allows every male indigenous villager in the New Territories, or ding, to build a three-storey home with each floor limited to 700 sq ft.
The policy was meant to meet villagers’ housing needs, but Liber Research Community, an NGO focused on land and development policies, suspects the new homes were not built for the villagers themselves and called on the government to investigate.
“In the past two years, one small house was built every day by possibly illegal means,” said Brian Wong Shiu-hung, a member of the group. “These buildings are suspected of having been sold to developers for profit, which goes against the objective of the small-house policy.”
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Hong Kong’s small-house policy: indigenous rights or unfair advantage?
The group believes some of the villagers’ development rights might have been sold to developers in secret deals that are hard to trace. In some cases, the transactions went through secret contracts and offshore companies set up in the British Virgin Islands, making them even harder to pin down.