HK leader in vow to resolve housing crisis
Print Edition
LI Suet-wen dreams of having a home where she has a bedroom and living room for her two children to play and study.
The reality is that her family lives in a one-room shoebox cubicle, one of five partitioned out of a small apartment in an aging walkup in a working class Hong Kong neighborhood.
Crammed into the 11-square-meter room is a bunk bed, small couch, fridge, washing machine and a tiny table. On one side of the door is a combined toilet and shower stall, on the other a narrow counter with a hotplate and sink. It feels like a storage unit, not a home.
Li’s 6-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter often ask, “Why do we always have to live in such small flats? Why can’t we live in a bigger place?” Li said.
“I say it’s because mommy doesn’t have any money,” said Li, a single mom whose HK$4,500 (US$580) a month in rent and utilities eats up almost half the HK$10,000 she earns.
Wong Tat-ming, 63, has occupied an even smaller home for four years. He pays HK$2,400 a month for a 1-meter by 2-meter compartment crammed with his meager possessions.
Leg pain from sclerosis forced Wong to quit driving a taxi 10 years ago. He gets by on HK$5,300 welfare a month.
Government figures reveal some 200,000 of Hong Kong’s 7.3 million residents live in subdivided units. That’s up 18 percent from four years ago and includes 35,500 children aged 15 and under. The figure doesn’t include many thousands more living in other “inadequate housing” such as rooftop shacks, metal cages resembling rabbit hutches and coffin homes made of stacked wooden bunks.
It’s a universe away from the lifestyles enjoyed by the rich living in luxury penthouses, or even those with middle-class accommodation in Hong Kong.
Carrie Lam, who takes office as Hong Kong’s next chief executive in July, has vowed to tackle the housing crisis she is inheriting from her predecessor Leung Chun-ying.
Lam says she will help middle-class families afford starter homes and expand the amount of land the government makes available for development.
“As everyone knows, for some time housing has been a troubling problem for Hong Kong,” she said in her victory speech. “I have pledged to assist Hong Kongers to attain home ownership and improve their living conditions. To do so we need more usable land. The key is to reach a consensus on how to increase the supply.”
Public housing is the best hope for most living on modest incomes.
Li applied two years ago but, with 282,300 people on the waiting list, the average wait is 4.7 years.
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