Hong Kong’s chief executive focuses on keeping public housing waiting time from increasing, but experts says 10,000 more flats needed a year
- Leader’s goal ‘realistic’, when wait more than double government’s pledge of three years, says Federation of Public Housing Estates chief
- Researcher concerned government will shorten waiting times at the expense of residents’ quality of life.
The Hong Kong leader’s “pragmatic” goal of preventing the wait for public housing from growing longer could be hard to achieve unless an additional 10,000 flats are provided a year and more temporary homes are made available, analysts say.
In response to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s expectation of the new administration to solve people’s livelihood problems, including their aspirations to live in bigger flats, John Lee Ka-chiu said on Sunday that his goal for housing was to at least keep the waiting time – at 6.1 years the highest in more than two decades – as it was, before finding ways to cut it short.
Asked when he met the press on Tuesday whether he would tackle the problem quickly enough, Lee said he had to contend with procedural and legal issues that took a long time to be solved.
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“I am pragmatic, I am not the chief executive that only chants slogans. I will frankly tell everyone the problem ... I promise I will work hard towards solving it.”
Lee said two task forces had been set up to provide more land and flats at a greater pace, and the one on public housing would submit a report within 100 days of the administration taking office.
Federation of Public Housing Estates chief Anthony Chiu said Lee’s goal of ensuring the wait for homes did not grow longer at was “realistic”, noting the current wait was more than double the government’s pledge of three years.
“I believe that the public housing wait hasn’t peaked yet. The more realistic way is to find ways to curb it from rising further,” Chiu said.
By March, there were about 147,500 general applications for public rental housing. The wait has grown longer in recent years, hitting 5½ years in June 2020 and the record 6.1 years in March this year.
“If the government wants to reduce the wait, on top of the rough average of 14,000 new public homes built annually, it has to provide an additional 10,000 flats yearly,” Chiu said.
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The former government had identified all 330 hectares (815.4 acres) of land needed to build 316,000 public flats in the decade to 2031, exceeding the 301,000 target. Only one-third of the homes would be completed within the first five years, while the remaining two-thirds would be completed in the latter half.
Property consultancy JLL estimated the wait for public housing would only get longer, given the forecast for the annual production for the next five years was 12,400 flats, lower than the figure of 13,800 for the past five years.
“The new government should consider boosting the supply of transitional housing to relieve the public housing shortage,” said Norry Lee, senior director of projects strategy and consultancy department at JLL.
Some transitional projects, which were one- or two-storey blocks made of pre-fabricated units, only took eight months to finish, he noted.
During an interview with TVB on Sunday, Lee said he would consider ways to build new homes on brownfield sites, as well as green belts, which served as buffers between urban land and countryside, or hilly sites in urban centres.
He said the government would conduct a comprehensive review of the 16,000 hectares of green belt zones and 1,600 hectares of brownfield sites to explore building housing and homes for the elderly.
To shorten the wait times for public rental housing, Lee also proposed allowing applicants to move into selected projects before community facilities or transport services were ready, so that flats could become available a year earlier.
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Lawmaker Leung Man-kwong, deputy chairman of the Legislative Council’s housing panel, said it was workable to reduce the time needed for building flats, as long as procedures for town planning, land resumption, construction and tendering process had been streamlined.
“The construction time can be reduced by 24 months or more. I hope that the coming report can organise different departments’ efforts to reduce time for construction,” Leung said on a radio programme.
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Brian Wong Shiu-hung, a member of the Liber Research Community, worried that the government would only focus on shortening the public housing waiting time without regard to living quality.
“It seems like the government just wants to push people to be housed and ignore their living quality,” Wong said.
Wong also suggested prioritising developing brownfield sites as many of the industries that operated on those sites were of a temporary nature.
