Hong Kong’s leadership contenders must debate housing and health care, not personality traits

Polling day for the chief executive election is just around the corner, on March 26. Instead of substantial policy issues, media coverage has, by and large, focused on the candidates’ personalities and their publicity tactics.

First, housing. Our policy of high land prices has remained unchanged for decades. Today, we face a shortage of affordable housing. The Leung Chun-ying administration has imposed cooling measures to try to suppress runaway property prices. Yet, they have not tackled the root causes. The government has to try something else.

Will Hong Kong’s next leader dare to stop selling land to the highest bidder?

I believe the property market should be strictly divided into two segments – public and private. The government should, on one hand, build more public rental housing and Home Ownership Scheme units; and, on the other, ensure minimal interference in the private market and allow prices to self-adjust. The priority should be to allocate land for public housing, while there should only be limited supply for private housing.

It is a lame bureaucratic excuse that there is not enough land in Hong Kong. The so-called brownfields alone are estimated to be about 1,200 hectares. There is also lots of idle government land in different areas, on top of the land now used for the golf course in Fanling, as well as military sites in Admiralty, Stanley and Kowloon Tong. The city should seriously consider reprovisioning these for housing purposes.

More land can come from redeveloping the old co-op premises built for civil servants during the British colonial period. The government can also amend the small house policy and move eligible indigenous New Territories villagers to public housing. Given such a multipronged approach, there would be no need to tamper with our country parks.

Scrap loss-making Hong Kong Disneyland and put public housing on the site instead