Shoebox, coffin homes a challenge for new leader

Rents and home prices have steadily risen and are now at or near all-time highs in Hong Kong.

HONG KONG » Li Suet-wen’s dream home would have a bedroom and living room where her two children could play and study. The reality is a one-room “shoebox” cubicle, one of five partitioned out of a small apartment in an aging walkup in a working class Hong Kong neighborhood.

Into the 120-squarefoot room are crammed a bunk bed, small couch, fridge, washing machine and tiny table. On one side of the door is a combined toilet and shower stall, on the other a narrow counter with a hotplate and sink. Clothes drying overhead dim light from a bare fluorescent tube. It feels like a storage unit, not a home.

Li’s 6-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter often ask, “Why do we always have to live in such small flats? Why can’t we live in a bigger place?” Li said.

“I say it’s because mommy doesn’t have any money,” said Li, a single mom whose HK$4,500 ($580) a month in rent and utilities eats up almost half the HK$10,000 ($1,290) she earns at a bakery decorating cakes.

Housing costs are among this wealthy Asian financial center’s biggest problems.

Some 200,000 of Hong Kong’s 7.3 million residents live in “subdivided units .” That’s up 18 percent from four years ago and includes 35,500 children 15 and under, government figures show. The figure doesn’t include many thousands more living in other “inadequate housing” such as rooftop shacks, metal cages resembling rabbit hutches and “coffin homes” made of stacked wooden bunks.

It’s a universe away from the lifestyles enjoyed by the rich living in lavish mountaintop mansions and luxury penthouses, or even those with middleclass accommodation in this former British colony.

Hong Kong regularly tops global property price surveys. Rents and home prices have steadily risen and are now at or near alltime highs.

The U.S.-based consultancy Demographia has ranked it the world’s least affordable housing market for seven straight years, beating Sydney, Vancouver and 400 other cities. Median house prices are 19 times the median income.

Beijing-backed Carrie Lam, who was chosen in March to be Hong Kong’s next chief executive, has vowed to tackle the housing crisis she is inheriting from her predecessor Leung Chun-ying.

Lam says that after she takes office in July she will help middle-class families afford starter homes and expand the amount of land the government makes available for development.

“As everyone knows, for some time housing has been a troubling problem for Hong Kong,” she said in her victory speech. “I have pledged to assist Hong Kongers to attain home ownership and improve their living conditions. To do so we need more usable land. The key is to reach a consensus on how to increase the supply.”

Prices have soared despite multiple rounds of government cooling measures, as money floods in from mainland China. Widening inequality helped drive mass pro-democracy protests in 2014. Young people despair of ever owning homes of their own. They lack space even to have sex, one activist lawmaker said last fall, using a coarse Cantonese slang term that caused a stir.

“If we cannot solve the housing problem, there will be more social problems,” said Sze Lai-shan, an organizer with social welfare group Society for Community Organization. “Social tensions will increase and people are (going to be) getting more annoyed with the government’s policies.”

Li says her children bicker nonstop.

“They fight over this and fight over that. If there’s a day off (from school), the two of them will argue,” she said. “The bigger they get, the more crowded it gets. Sometimes there’s not even any space to step,” she said. “They don’t even have space to do their homework.”

Public housing is the best hope for most living on modest incomes. Highrise public housing estates house about 30 percent of Hong Kong’s 7 million people. If homes bought with government subsidies are included, the number rises to nearly half.

Li applied two years ago, but with 282,300 people on the waiting list the average wait is 4.7 years.

KIN CHEUNG — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Li Suet-wen and her son, 6, and daughter, 8, live in a 120-square foot room crammed with a bunk bed, small couch, fridge, washing machine and small table in an aging walkup in Hong Kong as she pays HK$4,500 ($580) a month in rent and utilities. That’s...

KIN CHEUNG — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Wong Tat-ming, 63, sits in his “coffin home” which is next to a set of grimy toilets in Hong Kong as he pays HK$2,400 ($310) a month for a compartment measuring three feet by six feet. It’s crammed with all his meager possessions, including a sleeping...