Hong Kong Housing Authority to offer smallest flats ever at 186 sq ft – about 1½ parking space – in next batch of subsidised homes
- Some of the flats are set to be as small as 186 sq ft, with 30 per cent measuring less than 322 sq ft
- Francis Lam Ka-fai, vice-president of the Institute of Surveyors and its spokesman on housing policy, says the units are so small that they have ‘become a joke’
Tiny flats will make up a bigger part of next year’s batch of subsidised homes to be sold by Hong Kong’s Housing Authority, with some set to be as small as 186 sq ft – the equivalent of 1½ car parking spaces and the tiniest to be offered since the start of the Home Ownership Scheme in 1978.
The 320 small units, located in a development at the site of the former airport at Kai Tak, will be among the 8,926 subsidised flats to hit the market in the first quarter of next year, according to a source close to the Housing Authority.
About 30 per cent of the new batch will be smaller than 322 sq ft, the source said. Such flats are increasingly making up a bigger portion of the authority’s supply, accounting for 22 per cent in 2020 and 15 per cent in 2019.
The Home Ownership Scheme is designed to enable low- to middle-income households to buy affordable flats.
Francis Lam Ka-fai, vice-president of the Institute of Surveyors and its spokesman on housing policy, said he supported the generous discounts on the units, but slammed the tiny flats on offer in the new batch, saying they had “become a joke”.
“That’s really undesirable. Why did [the authority] go for such small units? I don’t know what their rationale is,” he said. “In terms of the design, [anything] less than 200 sq ft is really undesirable for anybody.”
The 2022 batch of flats will be located in seven mostly urban areas: Kai Tak, North Point, Ma Tau Kok, Kwun Tong, Tseung Kwan O, Sha Tin and Tung Chung.
Ranging from 186 sq ft to 479 sq ft, they will be sold at 49 per cent less than the market value, or between HK$1.24 million and HK$5.31 million (US$158,900 to US$680,600).