Developable land shortage at root of housing crisis
It is reported that Hong Kong will soon see the construction of Hong Kong’s first social housing development made from prefabricated units. The Hong Kong Council of Social Service has received a donation of a plot of land in Sham Shui Po. Three blocks of three-story apartments totaling 90 units will be ready sometime in the second half of next year. This is of course welcome news, as any initiative to increase housing supply is undoubtedly good news to residential-land-starved Hong Kong.
The extent of shortage of residential land in Hong Kong is transparent by looking at some statistics. Singapore has a population (5.8 million) 22 percent less than ours (7.4 million) but has residential land 30 percent more than that of ours (10,000 hectares cf. 7,666 hectares). If we are to enjoy comparable residential land supply based on our population, we would need 12,760 hectares or an increase of 5,100 hectares of residential land today.
Our Hong Kong Foundation, in an earlier report released recently, says the problem of housing shortage can be described as “undersized”, “undersupplied” and “underestimated”. Some “nano-flats” are hardly bigger than a parking space; Hong Kong had stopped creating new land in the past decade; projections for additional land needed in Hong Kong by 2030 are overly conservative as they fail to see the need to improve per capita living space and increase the area for supporting facilities.
Our Hong Kong Foundation’s projection for additional land needed by 2030 is 9,000 hectares, far exceeding the official estimate of 4,800 hectares. We can see that the government’s projected need for 4,800 hectares is for all land uses, and that is for 2030, more than a decade from now. Even if all the land is designated residential, that would still not be enough to meet Hong Kong’s needs today by Singapore’s standards!
Perhaps Singapore’s standards are really too high for us. Hong Kong wants more preservation, and would not agree to developing a significant chunk of our presently preserved land. But we certainly can afford to, and should, take some of the preserved land out of preservation, to improve the housing conditions of our citizens.
We need to note that Singapore presently preserves less than 10 percent of its total land area but it is a far more livable city than Hong Kong in the Mercer livability rating released earlier this year. Hong Kong ranks 71; Singapore 25. Although Singapore has developed over 90 percent of its total land area, as compared to 25 percent for us, it enjoys the reputation as a “garden city”. It is also still seeking to aggressively increase its land area by 5,600 hectares by 2030 compared to the 2010 base of 71,000 hectares.
To be realistic, we have no ambition to use “Singapore standard” in boosting our land supply. Given HongKongers’ strong desire for conservation, it is fine that over the long term we continue to preserve 90 percent or more of our country parks and special conservation areas. But when Hong Kong’s population has grown from 4.5 million to 7.4 million, it seems to be untenable to keep the original area of our country parks out of bounds.
Unfortunate and rather sad for Hong Kong, many of those who advocate preservation and nature conservation mislead the public by saying that if we take any land from the country parks, we would not have country parks to enjoy our weekends with our families there. We should trust in due processes. Every time a piece of land is taken out from preservation it will be scrutinized and has to be justified. The envisaged disappearance of our country parks is alarmist and will just not happen.
Another recent commentary also caught my eye. The commentator says that the proposed public-private partnership in developing agricultural land favors developers unfairly because it will involve the government supplying the infrastructure. Actually special assessments are commonplace overseas, and can be done in Hong Kong. Special assessments allow the government to tax developers for the benefit they receive when the government builds infrastructure.
All this suggests that our excessive concern for government-business collusion and for conservation is holding up our land supply. With an undersupply of buildable land, it will be even more important to use our buildable land efficiently. The proposed use of the lot to construct 90 units quickly using prefabricated components will hardly make any difference in the public housing stock in the near term but will hold up much bigger supply in the intermediate term.
For this reason I do not support the proposed Sham Shui Po project. Low-density prefabricated units should be built on temporarily available land only. If the land is already designated for residential and is in a well-serviced location, I would rather see that it be properly developed into permanent high-rise residential blocks than that it be the site of low-density housing.