Jake's View | Hong Kong’s housing shortage is not one of needs but of aspirations
Cheap subsidised public housing rents have created a situation where less people are living in each flat, meaning the problem is one of demand, not supply
Increasing land supply will not be enough to solve Hong Kong’s housing crisis if more subsidised flats are not built, property experts said yesterday...
SCMP February 6
Let me acquaint you with an anomaly that sits at the heart of our housing difficulties. It suggests that subsidies do not make things better.
As the first chart shows, in June 2003 the total stock of public rental housing (PRH) flats stood at 664,000 units. The total number of occupants was 2.2 million.
Shift forward to September last year, the last date for which I have figures, and the number of PRH flats stood at 802,000, an impressive 138,000 more than in mid 2003. But the number of occupants had risen by only 37,000, much less than the increase in the stock of flats.
This trend shows up even more strongly when you go back to 1990. As the first chart also shows, there had been no increase in the stock of PRH flats between the end of 1990 and mid 2003. The property price collapse of 1997 to 2003 got in the way.
But at the end of 1990 there were an estimated 2.9 million people living in PRH flats. The numbers actually fell by some 700,000 between 1990 and 2003 and then only rose marginally despite a big public housing construction boom.
