The film Dream Home is playing in Hong Kong. The slasher flick features a psychotic house hunter who, when thwarted in her desire to buy an apartment, turns to murder. There are many Hongkongers who must sympathise with her and most are hard-working middle-class professionals.
The profiteering of developers combined with the greed of speculators and the connivance of the government has priced a large number of middle-class Hongkongers out of a decent home.
Looking at apartments in other cities, most people tend to rank properties on a scale that might look like this: (5) OK (4) Pleasant enough (3) Good (2) Lovely (1) Dream home. In Hong Kong, where dingy, tiny flats with views of discarded laundry are on offer for the equivalent of US$1 million, the scale is more like: (5) Suicide risk (4) Depressing (3) Bearable with heavy medication (2) Bearable with light medication (1) Just about tolerable.
The city's middle class is forced to accept that owning a home that would be just about acceptable for a low-income family in most other cities will cost them an impossible fortune, an obvious sign that the market - or Hong Kong's plutocratic version of the same - has failed.
