Opinion | 280,000—a statistic of shame

By Philip Yeung, A university teacher

That number refers to 280,000 people said to be living in inhumane Subdivided Units in this glittering city. I suspect the number is actually much higher, as this government has never bothered to keep an accurate count of these disgraceful dwellings. The public-spirited Sir Gordon Woo, himself a developer, describes these habitations as morgue-like. Others compare them to prison cells in size, if not in misery. These "inmates" eat in front of the toilet, sweat it out in windowless 38.5-degree oven-like conditions. No wonder a protest graffiti declares: "I am not afraid to go to jail. I live better there."

Housing is Hong Kong's number one headache.

Hong Kong leaders, through different administrations, have been searching for a silver bullet. Carrie Lam's pet project idea is the Lantau Tomorrow vision, a massive land reclamation project that will reclaim 1000 to 17000 hectares of land, and eat up nearly one trillion Hong Kong dollars by some estimates. The feasibility study alone will cost over $500 million and take 42 months to complete, which means it will be two years after the current Chief Executive finishes her first term before we see a final report. As to when the project will produce housing units, no one really knows. Frankly, I have little patience for these pie-in-the-sky visionary schemes.

In the meantime, the voiceless underclass rot and roast in these hell holes.

Singapore is Hong Kong's regional rival. There, 90% of the population live in public housing, double our ratio. Its built-up area covers 72% of its land surface, versus 24.9% in Hong Kong.

There are plenty of usable lands for housing here. The brownfields, or abandoned agricultural plots currently occupied by car parks and warehouses, according to a rough government study, cover a total area of 860 hectares. But housing activists point out that this figure leaves out another 379 hectares sitting degraded and undeveloped in an overlooked area.

Then there is a second source of land: Our outdated and highly discriminatory small-house policy that has been hijacked by greedy villagers in the New Territories with vast numbers of low-density buildings when they could have been turned into high-density developments, if the government can coax the indigenous inhabitants into an agreement.

A third source of usable land is our vast country parks which cover nearly three quarters of our land surface. Environmentalists scream any time the government moots the idea of using remote park land for housing. But these self-righteous activists are not the ones cooped up in airless subdivided flats.

In describing the local mess, one wit says that in Hong Kong every government proposed initiative goes through what he calls a long "screaming" phase, of irate environmentalists or other vested interested groups legally or publicly challenging the proposal. Even where land is available, as in the case of brownfields, they are open to challenge in the form of judicial reviews, and rezoning of this misused land has to go through a painful process of bureaucratic clearance. Hong Kong is becoming known as the city of public consultations that lead nowhere. Talk becomes the substitute for action.

All these twists and delays percolate into simmering grievances that translate into street action.

The irony is that Hong Kong is one of the richest cities in the world, sitting on cash reserves of 800 billion dollars, even in the midst of a devastating pandemic. It does not lack usable land either. What it lacks is political will and the gritty determination to act.

Money in the hands of penny-pinching bureaucrats is just numbers. They preach financial prudence while the problems fester and the poor go gasping for air.

It looks like with the bill on Subdivided Units now before the Legislative Council, the government will normalize the abnormal. The existence and malignant growth of these infamous units is a stain on Hong Kong's reputation as a world city. And yet, the Secretary for Transport and Housing is almost apologetic to these unconscionable owners and openly fearful that they might leave the market if the return on their investment is less lucrative. What kind of warped logic is this? One flat chopped into tens of units already guarantees their profitability. Do you think they will hurt their own pockets by quitting the market and restoring these butchered units into their original shape and size? These units were illegal to begin with. Now, thanks to a conniving government, they are being made legal and even entitled to rental increases in the form of a cap.

Enlightened government is robbing the rich to pay the poor. Here, unlike the mainland, it is the reverse. While SDU owners have been laughing all the way to the bank, the poor are crying in their soup and praying for crumbs from the government's table.

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