Ryan IpandIris Poon

Opinion | Why Hong Kong’s land crisis cannot be fixed quickly by focusing on brownfield sites

Ryan Ip and Iris Poon say brownfield sites emerged as a result of planning negligence. Developing them, while accounting for the existing businesses and workers, will be more challenging than is commonly thought

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A man works at a recycling yard for vehicle parts operating on a brownfield site in Wang Toi Shan in Yuen Long in May 2018. The proposal to redevelop brownfield sites in the New Territories received strong public support in the Task Force on Land Supply’s public engagement exercise, but resettling existing businesses will be not be easy. Photo: Edward Wong

Ryan IpandIris Poon

Published: 6:30am, 11 Jan 2019Updated: 6:36am, 11 Jan 2019

The Task Force on Land Supply has finally published its report following a five-month public engagement exercise, dubbed the “big debate” by Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor. The report has proposed a multipronged approach to increase land supply and identified eight short-, medium- and long-term options.

However, in the near future, Hong Kong’s quest for solutions to its acute land shortage will face a dead end. The three short-to-medium-term options listed by the task force, when combined, can only provide 320 hectares of land, compared to the projected shortage of at least 815 hectares over the next 10 years.

Some have proposed that developing brownfield sites, former agricultural land in the New Territories that is being used for other purposes, alone could solve Hong Kong’s pressing land shortage. Yet, few realise that the emergence of brownfield sites is the result of negligence in land planning and development over the past two decades.

This failure, coupled with a surge in demand for land for logistics and industrial use driven by economic growth, has contributed to the current shortage. While the logistics industry’s share of Hong Kong’s gross domestic product has increased 57 per cent since 2000, the total floor space for private storage has risen just 11 per cent over the same period. Thus, businesses turned to idle land in the New Territories.

The unorganised manner in which this occurred eventually led to the brownfield disorder we face today. The emergence of brownfield sites parallels that of subdivided flats; the former is the consequence of a shortage of land for industrial and logistics use, the latter of a shortage of residential land.