Ryan IpandIris Poon

Opinion | If Hong Kong’s housing targets seem too good to be true, it’s because they are

The government’s rose-tinted projections of public flat numbers are not supported by the actual pace of construction and cannot relieve the city’s severe housing crunch. Worse, they take the focus away from the real problem at hand: the shortage of land

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Ryan IpandIris Poon

Published: 9:04am, 19 Feb 2019Updated: 12:34pm, 19 Feb 2019

Many grass-roots citizens in the affluent city of Hong Kong are struggling in shoebox-like living conditions. Queuing for public housing is like waiting for Godot – it takes 5½ years on average and that figure is growing, while the number of households living in inadequate housing, including subdivided flats, has risen to a staggering 116,600. The lag in the supply of public housing is one of the main culprits.

What is worrisome is that the lag in public housing supply is getting worse. It is true that the government has pledged to increase the ratio of public housing from 60 to 70 per cent of total housing supply, as stated in the latest annual progress report on Hong Kong’s long-term housing strategy.

This should mean we will see 126,000 public housing units in the supply pipeline over the next four years to 2023. However, this target is not matched by the progress report’s own forecast of completed flats, which suggest that only 73,700 more flats would be built, which would be more than 40 per cent lower than the supply target.

It is also interesting to compare the report’s 10-year supply target with how much land the government has identified for the purpose of public housing, and how many units can potentially be built on this land in the next 10 years. As the 2018 progress report noted, although the target is set at 315,000 new public housing flats from 2019 to 2028, even under the most optimistic conditions, the land that the government identified can supply only 248,000 flats in the same period. In other words, there will be a shortfall of at least 67,000 public housing flats in the next 10 years.

In fact, the shortfall will probably exceed this figure, because the government has already missed the target set four years ago for public housing flats. Its long-term housing strategy, announced in 2014, set a 10-year target of 290,000 public housing flats from 2015, which means an average of 29,000 flats a year. If evenly spread, Hong Kong would have had 116,000 new public flats in the four years to 2019.

But again, the government forecast was much lower than the target, and the actual number of completed flats lower still. The government projected a supply of only 77,800, and the completed number of flats, according to the Housing Authority, was 70,400 flats. This means a shortfall of nearly 40 per cent over the forecast.