Land should be used wisely to enhance social well-being
Last Saturday, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said at the Commission on Poverty Summit 2018 that resolving the housing problem was an essential part of poverty alleviation. She said increasing land supply was the prerequisite to addressing the housing problem in the long run.
The day before, Wang Zhimin, director of the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, told the chief executive and some 330 senior special administrative region government officials that President Xi Jinping had said the development of the Hong Kong and Macao SARs and the well-being of the people of the two regions weighs heavily on his mind. In addition, Xi emphasized the importance of seizing opportunities brought by the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and urged Guangdong to accelerate the implementation process of the project.
The two issues mentioned by Lam and Wang are indeed interrelated. On the one hand, the experience of Hong Kong’s time-consuming land development process taught us that the land and housing shortage in Hong Kong cannot be resolved by the SAR alone. On the other hand, the development of the Bay Area provides a golden opportunity for Hong Kong to ease its land shortage problem.
One of the possible solutions to land scarcity is to develop the cross-boundary areas between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The development of the Lok Ma Chau Loop area is a good first step.
The most important lesson from the Lok Ma Chau Loop project is that there are valuable land resources which were under-utilized in the past. With the determination and cooperation of both Hong Kong and the mainland governments, these land resources can be released and developed for Hong Kong people’s well-being. In the near future, there will be another major cooperation project at Chung Ying Street, with the potential to develop into a Greater Bay Area Quality Shopping, Tourism and Culture Area.
Chung Ying Street in Sha Tau Kok is a significant but unfamiliar area to many Hong Kong people. As a consequence of leasing the New Territories to Britain, the street is about 250 meters long, and 3 to 4 meters wide, jointly owned by Hong Kong and Shenzhen.
At present, Chung Ying Street is the only open boundary in Hong Kong that has no border control facilities but allows cross-boundary activities of people and goods.
In the 1980s, Chung Ying Street was a wellknown business street in Hong Kong and Shenzhen boundary areas. At present, it is unable to realize its commercial value due to its small economic scale, low attractiveness of products and poor facilities. Commercial development in Chung Ying Street is relatively slow and chaotic. However, with the rapid growth of the mainland economy and implementation of the Individual Visit Scheme which allows mainland residents to visit Hong Kong and Macao on an individual basis, Chung Ying Street, an old shopping paradise, has gone through drastic changes. The number of visitors has dropped from a peak of around 100,000 to a few thousand and profitability of the shops operating there has fallen as well. Meanwhile, unscrupulous business practices such as selling inferior goods and cheating customers have increased in Chung Ying Street. Moreover, the decline of business there has also affected commercial activities in Sha Tau Kok Market, wherein business and community activities have been shrinking.
Inconvenient transportation has also taken a toll on business activities in Sha Tau Kok Chung Ying Street. Residents in both the Hong Kong and Shenzhen sides of Sha Tau Kok rely heavily on buses as their primary mode of transportation, but it takes more than 2 hours to travel by bus to Sha Tau Kok from Central, Hong Kong and 1.5 hours from Fu Tian, Shenzhen. Both trips involve multi-transfers; worse, it is a common sight at peak hours that heavy traffic jams at the Wutong Mountain tunnel in the Shenzhen side clogs the roads to and from Sha Tau Kok.
The underdevelopment of Sha Tau Kok Chung Ying Street is a typical example of a waste of land resources in Hong Kong. To make full use of the commercial advantages of Sha Tau Kok Chung Ying Street and its precious land resources, the SAR government should be more open-minded. It should actively explore all possible strategies for further development of this district.