Long-time Lamma residents feel pinch of rising rents

Boxes surround Karen Carmen in her Sha Po village flat on Lamma Island. Faced with a rent increase from HK$18,000 to HK$23,000 a month, she has had to search for a new home. However, when she started scouting around at the property agencies, she was shocked by the prices.

"I found a place in a village I used to live in and less than two years ago, rent for a 700 sq ft apartment with a rooftop was HK$6,500 and now it asks HK$12,000. It's doubled in such a short amount of time," says Carmen.

Hayri Ozen has a similar tale of rent woes. He has been a Lamma resident for eight years and was running a kebab store off the main street of Yung Shue Wan, Lamma's main community. The rent for his 700 sq ft place rose from HK$4,000 to HK$12,000 over six years.

To solve the pressure of moving every two years when each lease ended, he bought a home but that did not make him completely immune. "Two weeks ago, my landlord increased the rent on my business by 100 per cent," Ozen says. "They don't care that I've been a good tenant for years."

Lamma Island, long a sanctuary from high-cost Hong Kong, is undergoing a radical rent rise. While most of the evidence is anecdotal and it is difficult to pinpoint hard data on the trend, residents describe a doubling of rent over the past four years. In the same timeframe, rents on private residences rose about 60 per cent in all of Hong Kong, according to the Rating and Valuation Department.

The rise is squeezing residents. "The people on Lamma are middle-class folk. We're not the overpaid bankers that can afford crazy rent [rises]," says Josh Sellers, a designer and branding consultant who has lived the past eight years on Lamma.