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Concrete Analysis | Leave the country parks and golf courses alone, Hong Kong has ample brownfields with public housing potential
- Carrie Lam could review decision to take any land from Fanling Golf Course, given the large areas in the pipeline for public housing
- Efforts to convert high-potential brownfield sites have allowed a pivot and bigger split towards public housing supply for next decade
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The government of Hong Kong, regrettably, has been its own worst enemy with regards to land production.
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Reclamations dropped dramatically from 4,000 hectares (9,884 acres) generated between 1976 and 1996, to some 1,000 ha created since then. At the same time, land resumptions fell considerably, to only 20 ha in the five years through 2018.
The cumulative effect of this shortage was highlighted by Michael Wong, the Secretary for Development, to the Legislative Council in December 2018. During the five-year period to 2017/18, some 37.75 ha designated mainly for government, institutional or community purposes but also including some green belt and open space, and 27 ha earmarked for private residential use, were re-zoned for public rental housing.
This relatively small-scale, unplanned, “scatter-gun” approach has failed. Last month, it was revealed that the average waiting time for the 150,000 general applications for public housing worsened to 5.8 years from 4.6 years in 2017.
This shows that the lack of proper forward planning and good governance resulted in there being no meaningful development programmes comparable to the existing nine new townships to meet the rising demand for public rental housing.
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