A multi-pronged approach is needed to boost land supply
The Task Force on Land Supply has put it very well. “A multi-pronged approach is ... required to increase land supply. The community as a whole has to balance the overall benefits and costs, the time required to provide land and other underlying issues pertinent to each land-supply option.” Indeed all the 18 options that it listed should be considered and acted upon as long as benefits outweigh costs. The public consultation is not meant to identify one option to the exclusion of all the others. An option is to be excluded if and only if acting on that option would bring society more costs than benefits. The burden of proof is on those who make such claims.
Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor recently said a key point of her Policy Address will be land supply, and that in order to ensure Hong Kong’s long-term land supply is adequate, reclamation seems to be unavoidable. She was criticized immediately for “preempting the public consultation”. This criticism is very strange.
First of all, in a public consultation, the key is to let everybody interested in the subject be candid, voice out what they think. The CE offers her perspective. That does not exclude others from expressing their views. Moreover, to say reclamation is unavoidable is not to exclude any of the other options listed. If she had said: Option X must not be considered, she should certainly be criticized. To exclude an option is tantamount to saying that even creating a hectare of land supply under that option would produce more costs than benefits. No one should say such a thing unless one has very strong evidence to that effect.
The task force listed four short- to medium-term options that may have the potential to provide additional land in about 10 years’ time. They include development of brownfield sites, converting agricultural land to residential and other urban uses, converting recreational land held under private recreational leases, and converting recreational land held publicly into residential and other urban uses by relocating the facilities or consolidating them. Of these four, the option that offers the greatest potential would seem to be agricultural land, as reclamation does not involve displacing existing uses, and the scope for using reclamation to produce new land is big. The others of course do offer some scope of land-supply increase but the scale is likely to be much more limited.
The task force has identified near-shore reclamation outside Victoria Harbour and developing the East Lantau Metropolis as two of six medium- to long-term land-supply options. Of the remaining four, developing two pilot areas on the periphery of country parks is probably the most controversial. But we really should be more open-minded, and the government should establish trust-worthy mechanisms to contain alarmist and unwarranted fears. Under the “costs of development”, the task force says: “Developing any part of the country parks for housing purposes is not compatible with the existing uses of country parks and is against the objectives of having country parks in the first place. If the integrity of country parks is affected, its ecological and public enjoyment value may be undermined.