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Written by: Commentary Editing Room
2021-01-19 06:30
Last update date: 2021-01-19 06:30
The local research agency, a non-governmental organization, recently issued a report criticizing the "nanoization" of private buildings in Hong Kong in recent years.
In fact, don’t public housing units get smaller and smaller?
Some newspapers pointed out that the proportion of small units with an indoor floor area of 21 square meters or less accounted for more than half of public housing completed in 2020-2024, which was higher than the 41% completed in 2015-20.
The Housing Authority said that the household population has fallen, the site area is small, and the proportion of small units has increased. It also points to the increase in the actual per capita area in recent years.
These replies are confusing. The truth is that the Government has not been willing to drastically open up housing land in the New Territories in the past to build livable housing.
A reasonable living area can help relieve the pressure of life, and I am willing to settle down in this city and imagine the future.
Don't officials understand such a simple truth?
The allocation standard for public housing is 75 square feet, but there are still more than 10,000 overcrowded households with a per capita living area of less than 75 square feet.
(Photo by Liang Pengwei)
At present, the per capita indoor area of public housing units shall not be less than 7 square meters. However, when the Housing Authority has built units in recent years, the area has only stayed at the qualified line. The area of Class A units for one to two persons is only 14 square meters, and the area is only 14 square meters. The three-person Type B unit is only 21 square meters.
What's more, there are newspapers collating information from the Housing Authority. The number of Type A and Type B units from 2020 to 2024 accounted for 52%, with a total of 34,400 units, which is 11 percentage points higher than the number of units completed in 2015 to 2019.
Many people lament that public housing is getting smaller and smaller, even returning to the level of the previous generation.
In the seven-story buildings of the 1950s and 1960s, the unit area was about 11 square meters, but now the Class A units are only three square meters more.
Although the area of public housing units gradually widened in the 1980s and 1990s, it narrowed again around 2000.
Taking a five-person unit as an example, the area of a harmonious public housing unit in 1992 reached 43.2 square meters.
But in 2003, the area of modular public housing was reduced to 37 square meters.
Housing Authority's explanation is not convincing
In September 1957, the construction of Laohuyan Village was completed, with three single-wing resettlement buildings (Block D, E and F).
(Photo of the Hong Kong Government Archives)
The Housing Authority put forward three points to explain the current increase in the number of small units, that is, the applicant’s household population is declining, the site environment is limited, and the land is being used to the fullest.
These reasons are actually not convincing. At most, they only point out the difficulties of the Housing Authority.
First, the decline in the number of households is not directly related to the decrease in unit area.
Although the big family of the old days is no longer there, the Housing Authority should not be rigid in its handling of affairs and keep the unit area close to the number of household members.
The Housing Authority has retorted from time to time that even though the units have become smaller in recent years, the actual per capita living area has actually increased. For example, the average per capita living area reached 13.3 square meters the year before.
This statement only reinforces the small facts of the recent units, or even blames the old residents for living wide.
In all fairness, a one-person unit with an area of 20 square meters and a three-person unit at least 40 square meters is not excessive.
Secondly, the limited site area is not necessarily the responsibility of the Housing Authority, and there is no doubt that the government's planning faults.
This problem has already arisen. Former officials of the Housing Department admitted that the land granted by the government to the Housing Authority to build public housing after 2000 is no longer a large area of flat land, but a three-pointed octagonal, small area, so it is difficult to uniformly adopt the standard Building design.
To meet the public housing policy goals, the Housing Authority will be allocated units for the first time within three years for applicants on the Waiting List. However, under the above restrictions, each unit must be reduced to "make the best use of the land."
The last government's chanting of "a single inch of land must be contended" and "stuck at the cracks" made this chaos even worse.
Kai Tak Permits Hong Kong to build flats
Both Qiqing Village and Delang Village were occupied in 2013
Looking back, did Hong Kong really not have a large area of land to build houses in the 2000s?
Of course not. It's just that the government sold a considerable amount of land to real estate developers for construction. Secondly, the government refused to develop large-scale idle land in the New Territories.
Don't forget that in the years since 2006, the number of public housing completions has plummeted, and new applications cannot be digested. This is an important reason for the long waiting list. The so-called not enough new public housing to make the best use of it is the government's own recruitment.
Take the Kai Tak New Development Area of 328 hectares as an example. Currently, there are only two public housing estates in Kai Ching and Tak Long, covering an area of only more than nine hectares. Only in recent months has additional land allocated to the Housing Society to build subsidized housing.
As long as one or two more plots of land were allocated to build public housing, each plot would be 10 to 20% larger, and the size of each household would have conditions to increase.
In general, the government's housing planning policy is wrong, and the Housing Authority must compare the floor space of tenants, resulting in a reduction in the area of public housing completed now and in the future.
Even though the accountable officials promised to actively develop land, they only focused on reclaimed land and still underestimated the existing land in the New Territories. Moreover, even though they promised to develop 70% of the land, they never spoke about the area.
For the same reason, this year’s Policy Address announced that it had found land to meet the long-term housing strategy’s needs for public housing units in the next ten years. However, the document did not mention the location and scale of the public housing units, which made people suspect that the government ignored the quality of the living environment in order to meet the standards. As long as the residents are canned sardines, they can be placed in the bucket.
Housing is not only used for living, but also a place to stabilize life and plan careers and families.
Living small does not necessarily limit your imagination, but you must feel compelling and lonely and uneasy. It will also increase friction between family members living in the same room, damage your mental and mental health, and do more harm than good to society.
The government has the ambition to give Hong Kong people a peaceful home and work, so officials should promptly reform the housing policy, open up existing land and build public housing, and set a reasonable minimum living area per capita as in other big cities to truly achieve a livable city.
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