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Shades Off | How to solve Hong Kong’s persistent housing issues: think like the mainland
- Hong Kong’s laws may offer protections, but they have been holding back development for decades
- It is time our officials updated their ways and mainlandised how they think, to better serve the people and achieve the government’s goals
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By the Hong Kong government’s latest reckoning, the city’s future lies to the north in the New Territories, in a 300 sq km area abutting Shenzhen, its nearest mainland neighbour. The grand plan is that the two will merge to create a technology-driven powerhouse to push forward Beijing’s Greater Bay Area idea.
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The vision, designated the Northern Metropolis by Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor in her policy address in October, involves transforming a sleepy, largely rural, backwater with narrow roads and dotted with tens of thousands of three-storey village houses into a thriving hi-tech zone with 2.5 million people.
Therein lies the problem. As good as the proposal is, taking it from the drawing board to reality will require a power far mightier than local officials.
There is a good reason the New Territories, which accounts for about 86 per cent of Hong Kong’s area, remains largely undeveloped. It is firmly in the hands of descendants of the original inhabitants, quaintly termed by the government as “indigenous”.
That entitles men, when they turn 18, to a plot of land on which to build a three-storey house, each level of no more than 700 square feet – a luxury by Hong Kong standards. That guarantee and the rules that restrict how the property can be handled mean that projects are limited in scale.
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Hong Kong’s small-house policy: indigenous rights or unfair advantage?
Hong Kong’s small-house policy: indigenous rights or unfair advantage?
Evidence of the challenge lies in what the British colonial government was able to achieve in almost a century of occupation of the New Territories. Apart from a handful of new towns, its legacy is roads wide enough for one or two vehicles, an extensive drainage channel system and a mandatory public toilet in every village.
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