Hong Kong struggles to tame a long-simmering housing crisis
AS HING Lam Leung summits the nine floors of staircases up to his rooftop home in the heart of Hong Kong, the 65-year-old former construction worker points to a tiny hut filled with trash, cigarette butts and syringes.
“One tenant used to live there,” says Leung as he catches his breath; behind him yawns the dizzying skyline of one of the world’s most densely populated districts, Yau Ma Tei. “One day he left and never came back.”
For Leung, who emigrated to the city from mainland China four decades ago, life – as for the many thousands of others on the bottom rungs of Hong Kong’s housing market – is a constant uphill struggle. Home for him is a hodgepodge of wood and concrete fastened to the top of a high-rise. Slats of rusty corrugated steel serve as his roof.
He’s lived here for two years, since his last apartment was sold to a private developer. Retired after a leg injury at work, he’s limited to a small monthly government allowance of HK$2,515 (S$453). He shares a toilet with several other tenants on the rooftop. Owned by a landlord on the floor below, the space was so dilapidated it took him nine days to remove all of the trash.
“I was exhausted after walking up and down those stairs so much,” says Leung. “My legs began to seize up.”
Of all the world’s housing crises, Hong Kong’s may be the most formidable. The city of 7.3 million leads the world in housing prices and inequality, with 125,100 millionaires and 1.6 million people living in poverty. Home prices have rocketed by 187 per cent over the last decade. In May, the number of public housing applicants hit 245,000, with an average wait time of 6.1 years – the highest in over two decades. According to lawmaker Scott Leung, a shortage of 30,000 units in the next five years means that the public housing queue will soon stretch to 6.5 years.
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Eye-watering rents have forced about 220,000 of the city’s most vulnerable residents into grim, often illegal accommodations, like the city’s infamous “coffin homes” – subdivided units in tenements barely large enough to fit a bed inside – or rooftop huts like the one Leung inhabits.
Local officials face growing scrutiny over the issue. In June, China’s cabinet-level office overseeing the city, the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, took the unusual step of calling on Hong Kong leader John Lee, who came to power in July, to fix the city’s “prominent problems such as housing”. In a speech on Jul 1 marking 25 years since Hong Kong returned to China’s rule, President Xi Jinping called for “more decent housing” in the city. These warnings followed calls last year from Beijing to eliminate the city’s substandard housing altogether by 2049.
In his first policy address on Oct 19, Lee said housing “tops the agenda” and pledged to build 30,000 larger, cheaper transitional homes in the next five years and to cap the wait for public flats at six years. These latest proposals join two older plans to add more housing by dramatically increasing the city’s physical footprint. The HK$100 billion Northern Metropolis project aims to house 2.5 million people on undeveloped land in northern Hong Kong, while Lantau Tomorrow is even more ambitious: The HK$624 billion reclamation effort would create about 1,700 hectares of land off Lantau Island. But both projects face huge legal, technical and environmental challenges.
Many critics point to the huge homebuilding policy of Singapore, which, despite having a similar climate and population to Hong Kong, could scarcely have a more contrasting reality: 80 per cent of its residents live in flats built by public authorities.
“The only real solution is to move people to public housing,” says Yip Ngai-ming, a public policy professor at City University of Hong Kong. “But for many years, simply not enough has been built.”
But the city’s ominous post-pandemic deficit – set to exceed HK$100 billion this year alone – could shackle infrastructure spending. “I think the problem isn’t going to go away for at least a decade,” says Yip.
The urgency around addressing Hong Kong’s slow-burn housing crisis is growing as the effects of climate change bring hotter, stormier weather. The month of July was Hong Kong’s hottest since records began in 1884, with a mean temperature of 30.3 deg C and 21 days of very hot weather warnings. In September, Hong Kong broke its record for its hottest ever September day, and then again a few days later.
Before midday on an early October day, the temperature in Leung’s rooftop home sat at 34.9 deg C.
“It feels like it’s gotten hotter and hotter in the past years,” he says. In midday heat, Leung rests in the shade of the city’s tiny “pocket parks” or cools down in an air-conditioned shop. He once would go for milk tea in cafes with friends, but that’s become prohibitively expensive. So is eating out, but even cooking rice at home raises the temperature in his tiny living space.
As in cities around the world, the effects of rising heat in Hong Kong are being felt most keenly by the poorest. According to a report published in July by the non-profit Society for Community Organization (Soco), subdivided units are typically 9 to 11 degrees hotter than outdoors.
“The living environments are so bad and landlords don’t do anything for them,” says Esther Wu Ka-yi, a social worker for Soco. “Many people have to live in subdivided units for 10 years or more. More public housing is the only way to fix this.”
Tong Fei Yeung is one of those living in a windowless box room. The 69-year-old, based in the traditionally working-class neighborhood of Sham Shui Po, has created holes in his wall so that air can pass through. “It’s really stuffy inside,” says Yeung, a former factory worker who moved into his subdivided unit in 2019.
According to a 2021 report from Oxfam Hong Kong, nearly 70 per cent of 200 subdivided flat residents surveyed said intense heat affected their daily lives; some reported experiencing heatstroke and cramps. Some 60 per cent of respondents complained of poor ventilation and almost 20 per cent had no windows. Other forms of extreme weather were also adding stress: More than a quarter saw damage to their flats – 80 per cent of which were smaller than 150 square feet – during typhoons and rainstorms, including water leaking through the walls.
“Extreme weather brought about by climate change, like increasingly hot summers, aren’t just affecting the poorest when they work outdoors,” says Wong Shek-Hung, director of the Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan programme at Oxfam Hong Kong. “Their homes have become so hot they’re like bamboo steamers.”
Hong Kong’s Climate Action Plan 2050, released last year, includes a pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by the middle of the century. But Oxfam says the city’s proposals, which focus on infrastructure, neglect immediate adaptation needs. “It’s not geared towards the poor,” says Wong. “What’s urgently needed are climate adaptation measures related to the most vulnerable people.”
The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic added yet another stressor for low-income residents. When a deadly Omicron wave roared through the city’s population in spring 2022, public spaces closed and lockdowns confined families to crowded apartments. For many children, virtual schooling was nearly impossible, with multiple generations of families living together in cramped subdivided units.
“They are subjected to such small spaces,” says Bea Sweeney, co-founder of the student-run non-profit Unlivable. “Families are sharing the same bathrooms and kitchens, there’s conflict and there’s a lot of noise. It’s so difficult to study.”
Oxfam’s Wong says that transitional housing – basic, quick-to-construct homes that can temporarily house those waiting for public accommodation – could provide a short-term solution. The city has about 50,000 vacant buildings that could be quickly converted into residential spaces, for example, and more than 70 short-term tenancy sites that have been allocated as car parks but have been idle for 15 years or more. Oxfam estimates a 20,000 square-foot site could translate into about 288 flats; if all 70 sites were developed, they could provide some 20,000 transitional flats. “We think that these lands can be used,” says Wong.
For its part, the city has said it will repurpose Covid isolation rooms as transitional housing.
One project already is piloting such efforts: The Housing in Place (HiP) Emergency Shelter and Community Space this year turned an abandoned 1960s residence into a compound offering two floors of emergency accommodation for 12 adults as well as community spaces, legal consultations, health workshops and food distribution for 1,200 users a month.
The renovation, which took several months, involved stripping the old interior and introducing climate-adapted materials, such as sustainably engineered bamboo, to prevent mold, maximise light and natural ventilation, and reduce energy use. Each component can be relocated and reused at other sites, from individual air conditioners to office furniture, laundry facilities, fitted kitchens and bespoke bedroom pods.
“Everything has been designed to be modular, flexible, lightweight and high quality,” says Juan Du, founding director of the University of Hong Kong’s Urban Ecologies Design Lab, which is spearheading the project.
The building, which spans over 4,000 square feet and four floors, was donated rent-free to the three-year project by Hong Kong property developer Chinachem Group, and there are no plans to redevelop it for at least another two years. The conversion doesn’t add to developers’ costs and could be a money-saver for the government, with HiP’s designs costing roughly 80 per cent less than a new construction of the same size.
“This is a blueprint for the future of transitional housing,” says Jo Hayes, chief executive of Habitat for Humanity Hong Kong, which is supporting the project. “It’s a demonstration of what could happen in other unused buildings.”
A spokesperson for the Hong Kong Housing Bureau said that increasing land supply and speeding the production of new housing will help resolve the problem of subdivided units. As of August 2022, the spokesperson said, the bureau had identified more than 20,000 transitional housing units to develop, with 5,400 units currently open, as part of a HK$11.6 billion plan.
However, critics say even the policy regarding transitional housing is broken. Oxfam found that 98 per cent of those it surveyed had not applied for transitional housing, with many fearing that the two or three years offered would not be long enough for them to be given public housing. And those fears appear justified: In September, nearly 100 households had to move out of Nam Cheong 220, the first transitional housing project in Hong Kong, due to the expiration of the land lease after less than two years. Only 25 per cent of the households were offered public housing units, and nearly 60 per cent had to move to transitional housing far away. Around 10 households were unwilling to relocate to a remote region and ended up returning to the private market to live in subdivided flats again. “Tenancies in transitional housing should be increased to 10 years,” says Oxfam’s Wong.
Others argue that the conditions of subdivided units and the rights of tenants must be improved. While the Tenancy Control Ordinance came into effect in January – restricting rent increases, prohibiting landlords overcharging on utilities bills and guaranteeing four-year tenures – minimum housing standards must be raised and “there needs to be better implementation,” according to Hayes.
“The city has to work on multiple levels,” says City University of Hong Kong’s Yip. “Land development is going to be expensive and will take decades. The scale of transitional housing might not be large enough. The quality of subdivided units must be improved, and there could be caps on rent increases.”
For tenants trapped in Hong Kong’s most marginal living spaces, like Leung, those changes can’t come soon enough. The government restarted his waiting time for public housing when he forgot to update his address after moving. Now at the back of the line, he is due to get an apartment, he says, in seven years.
“I have no choice,” he says. “I can only rely on the government.” BLOOMBERG
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