Hong Kong public housing policy still failing low income families
Residents who have been waiting years to get into public housing say system is letting them down
Seventy-year-old Poon Kang-chiu has been waiting for a public housing rental flat for more than four years, but when he checked last month, the government told him he needed to wait for at least another two years.
To him, the government’s target to assign each eligible family a rental flat in an average of three years is “all talk”.
“If I need to wait for two more years, I would have been waiting twice as long [as the target time],” Poon said.
And he cannot afford to wait.
Renting a 60 sq ft subdivided unit in Sham Shui Po for HK$3,500 a month, the retiree had to take up all sorts of part-time jobs to make a living, earning less than HK$10,000 a month even with the government’s subsidies for the elderly.
