Concrete Analysis | Improving quality of life and Hong Kong’s liveable city agenda

As we move into the period when Legislative Council candidates are starting to articulate their focus areas and, more particularly, as potential Chief Executive candidates begin to give thought to their manifestos, it might be timely to set out what I believe should be one of the key drivers from a community point of view – improving quality of life in Hong Kong and the our liveable city agenda from a housing perspective.

We make progress on the supply of land but affordability still remains a fundamental challenge. There is much talk about a range of “smart city” initiatives but we still fail to address the issue of housing in a holistic and integrated manner. Quality of life priorities obviously differ from person to person, family to family, but I consider housing to be common to all.

In response to affordability, we are building smaller and smaller flats but these are unlikely to meet the aspirations of future generations and there is a real risk of increasing social problems including smaller families with fewer and fewer children. Finding a solution clearly requires some radical thinking but there is the opportunity to review residential land pricing policies and sales conditions in certain pre-determined areas such as the proposed new towns in the New Territories and, when it eventually happens, the East Lantau Megopolis. Perhaps we could specify minimum unit sizes in future land grants rather than minimum unit numbers.

With a view to increasing affordable stock we should also revisit the proven model successfully implemented in other jurisdictions where affordability is also an issue under which developers are required in the case of larger projects to provide a certain percentage of affordable/social housing within the development.

We also need to step back and consider carefully where we are heading in terms of public rental housing (PRH). If government’s predictions prove correct we will have more than one million public rental units in Hong Kong in 10 years. This is not a tenable model over the longer term with an increasing burden on the community in the form of subsidised occupation and, ultimately, replacement costs.

Having been a member of the Housing Authority I fully accept and, indeed, advocated that we should help those who cannot help themselves. However, there are clearly different levels of assistance which might be provided and over time we should be actively seeking to convert as many as possible of these renters into owners.