Budget to consider public housing waiting list

This Monday (February 21), the Housing Authority announced the latest information on the average waiting time and the number of applications for public rental housing.

The average waiting time for general applicants who were housed to PRH in the past 12 months was six years, and the average waiting time for elderly one-person applicants was four years, an increase of 0.1 year and 0.2 year respectively compared with the previous quarter.

As of the end of last year, there were about 15,200 general public housing applications and about 96,500 non-elderly one-person applications under the Quota and Points System.

The last time the average waiting time for public housing reached six years was in 1999, 23 years ago.

At that time, Hong Kong was still under the tenure of the first Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa. In his first "Policy Address" in October 1997, he proposed to "reduce the average waiting time for public housing to three years", and even set a new policy for this purpose. A specific timetable for achieving the target in 2005 is pursued.

This goal was ostensibly achieved later, but to a considerable extent by excluding the waiting time for non-elderly one-person applications.

The waiting time for public housing has been rising.

(file picture)

Put the cart before the horse in public housing applications

Since then, the SAR Government has always claimed that the average waiting time for public housing of three years is still one of its policy goals.

According to common sense, the best way to maintain compliance is to continue to build or rebuild more public housing units. However, affected by various factors, the actual situation is that the number of housing construction has been on a downward trend.

The HA's rental housing completions plummeted from 55,492 units in 2000/01 to 9,938 units in 2014/15.

As the calculation method of excluding non-elderly one-person applications can no longer reduce the figure to less than three years, the officials in charge have also begun to introduce other measures to put the basics behind, including the introduction of the "Green Form Home Ownership Scheme" in 2015 to attract existing tenants to vacate Flats are given to waiting families, and at the same time, the public housing quota and points system have been revised to further reduce the housing allocation opportunities and application intentions of non-elderly singles. Open to those who have applied for public housing for more than one year.

The Chief Executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, proposed a pilot scheme to open up the "green home ownership" stub units currently being sold to those who have applied for public housing for more than a year.

(Photo by Yu Junliang)

The society expects public housing applicants to achieve the goal of going upstairs for an average of three years. It wants to meet the living needs of this group of people, so that they can find a place to live and work in Hong Kong without having to pay high rents and "subdivided housing", "" "Cage House" kind of difficult environment.

Helplessly, looking at the way the authorities have responded to public housing applications in recent years, it seems that they are just trying to "catch numbers" and "create numbers" to meet the facade indicators as soon as possible. Outside public housing.

Waiting situation is more severe

What is especially surprising is that when the Housing Authority explained why the average waiting time for public housing increased, it actually said that it was because several public housing projects were completed at the end of last year. of general applicants were allocated PRH, and their waiting time was thus reflected in the latest average waiting time.”

Such rhetoric makes people feel that the authorities do not take the real waiting time of the public seriously at all. After all, it is precisely because the calculation only considers the situation of the assigned person that the remaining group of families on the waiting list deserves more attention.

Among the 15,200 general applications currently on the waiting list, many families may have long waited longer than the average waiting time for the matched candidates.

This problem is vaguely revealed in the 15,800 general applications that were resettled to public housing between July 2020 and June 2021, with more than half of about 9,100 families having a waiting time of six years or more.

Moreover, as mentioned above, these figures do not take into account the non-elderly one-person application whose waiting time is definitely longer, which shows that the situation of the overall waiting list is always more severe than the average waiting time of six years.

The average waiting time for public housing has returned to six years, which is twice as long as the three-year commitment to go upstairs.

Fortunately, long-term development projects such as the "Northern Metropolis" will be launched soon. According to a poll conducted by the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies of the Chinese University of A "Budget", from which we hope to see that after the social movement and the epidemic subside, those who run Hong Kong can really respond to social expectations and show actual housing results.

Public housing supply figures are inappropriately exaggerated. Before the public housing waiting time "six"