Public housing in Hong Kong

Based on Wikipedia: Public housing in Hong Kong

The Fire That Built a City

On Christmas Day, 1953, a fire tore through the hillside shantytown of Shek Kip Mei in Hong Kong. By the time the flames died down, more than fifty thousand people had lost everything. Their homes—makeshift structures of wood, tin, and whatever materials desperate refugees could scavenge—were gone.

This catastrophe would reshape one of the world's most densely populated cities.

Within a year, the colonial government had constructed Hong Kong's first public housing estate on that same scorched hillside. What began as an emergency response to a single disaster evolved into one of history's most ambitious housing programs. Today, nearly half of Hong Kong's seven million residents live in some form of government-subsidized housing—a proportion that would be almost unimaginable in most Western cities, where public housing often carries stigma and serves only a small fraction of the population.

Before the Fire: A Crisis Already Brewing

The 1953 fire makes for a dramatic origin story. But the truth is more complicated.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, waves of migrants from mainland China had flooded into Hong Kong, creating a housing crisis that predated the fire by decades. As early as 1935, a colonial government committee had proposed building low-cost housing for the public. The proposals went nowhere. Hong Kong was in an economic downturn, and there was no political will to spend money on housing the poor.

Even Governor Alexander Grantham, who would later be credited with launching public housing after the fire, had been pushing for subsidized housing since 1949—four years before Shek Kip Mei burned. He faced opposition from Chinese members of the Legislative Council, who apparently saw little reason for the government to intervene in the housing market.

The fire didn't create the housing crisis. It simply made ignoring it impossible.

Twenty-Four Square Feet Per Person

The first public housing blocks were brutally minimal.

Designed in an H-shape, these resettlement buildings offered residents little more than small cubicles. The official allocation was twenty-four square feet per adult—roughly the size of a queen mattress—and half that for children under twelve. Bathrooms and laundry facilities were communal, located in the crossbar of the H that connected the two residential wings.

Even this meager space was often shared by multiple families, such was the desperation for housing.

Rent was set between ten and fourteen Hong Kong dollars per month, with no income caps to qualify. The government wasn't trying to create comfortable homes. It was trying to get people off the streets and out of fire-prone shanties. The buildings were cheap to construct, quick to erect, and functional in the most basic sense of the word.

Today, every one of those original H-shaped blocks has been demolished except one: Mei Ho House, the last surviving example of the "Mark I" building design, now preserved as a Grade I historic building. Where fifty thousand refugees once crammed into cubicles, tourists now visit a museum about Hong Kong's public housing history.

The Evolution of Living Space

Standards improved slowly but steadily.

By 1963, the government had increased the minimum floor area to thirty-five square feet per person—still tiny by Western standards, but a nearly fifty percent improvement over the original allocation. A new Housing Board was established to coordinate between agencies and conduct annual evaluations of supply and demand.

The late 1960s brought another innovation: elevators. Lower Ngau Tau Kok Estate, built between 1967 and 1970, was among the first public housing developments to include lifts. The sixteen-story blocks had elevators that stopped at the eighth and thirteenth floors—residents living on other floors would take the lift to the nearest stop and walk the remaining flights.

This might seem like a minor detail, but it transformed what was possible. Without elevators, buildings were limited to perhaps six or seven stories—the maximum most people could reasonably climb daily. With elevators, Hong Kong could build upward almost without limit. Today, most new public housing blocks exceed forty stories.

A Little Town Within a City

In 1975, the government unveiled something genuinely new: Oi Man Estate.

The blocks themselves were innovative, built in a twin-tower layout with two square towers interlocked together. Each floor had sixteen units of varying sizes, and crucially, each flat had its own private kitchen and toilet. No more communal facilities. No more sharing bathrooms with strangers.

But the real innovation was conceptual. Oi Man Estate was designed as "a little town within a city"—a self-contained community with commercial amenities built into the development. Markets, barbershops, banks, restaurants. The estate housed forty-six thousand people on just twenty-one acres, with everything they needed for daily life within walking distance.

This represented a philosophical shift. Earlier public housing had been about providing shelter—the bare minimum to keep people dry and safe. Oi Man Estate was about creating communities. Commercial spaces were let out through public tender, with larger premises like banks and restaurants competing on five-year contracts based on the monthly rental they offered. Street vendors, once tolerated in earlier estates, were no longer permitted. There would be designated market stalls and cooked-food stalls instead.

The government was no longer just housing the poor. It was engineering how they would live.

New Towns Rising from Fishponds

Hong Kong is famously short on land. The territory covers just over four hundred square miles, much of it mountainous and unsuitable for development. To house its growing population, the government pursued an audacious strategy: it would create new land entirely.

Tin Shui Wai, conceived in 1987, was planned for construction on two hundred and forty hectares of reclaimed fishponds and wetland in the New Territories. Because it was built from scratch on virgin land rather than squeezed into existing urban fabric, planners could design it with wider walkways and larger open areas than older developments permitted.

This was the model Hong Kong would follow for decades: massive new towns rising from reclaimed land in the New Territories, connected to the urban core by rail lines and highways. Today, many of Hong Kong's largest public housing estates are found in these new towns, purpose-built communities housing hundreds of thousands of people each.

Older estates, meanwhile, found themselves transformed by urban expansion. Developments that were once built on the periphery now sit deep in central urban areas as the city grew around them. Public housing can be found in every district of Hong Kong except Wan Chai—one of the oldest and most expensive neighborhoods on Hong Kong Island.

The Path to Ownership

For the first quarter-century of public housing, residents could only rent. They had a roof over their heads, but no stake in the property, no asset to pass on to their children.

That changed in 1980 with the launch of the Home Ownership Scheme, which allowed low-income families to purchase subsidized flats for the first time. The scheme worked through a clever mechanism: the government would build housing estates, then sell units at prices heavily discounted from market value—often fifty percent or more below what similar private apartments would cost.

There were restrictions, of course. Buyers had to meet income limits. Mortgages and resales were restricted to other eligible low-income residents. The land itself was subsidized, meaning owners were buying the flat but not the full value of the ground it stood on.

Related schemes followed. The Tenants Purchase Scheme allowed existing renters in public estates to buy the flats they already occupied. The Sandwich Class Housing Scheme, launched in the 1990s, targeted middle-income residents who earned too much to qualify for standard public housing but still couldn't afford private apartments—the so-called "sandwich class" squeezed between subsidized housing below and market-rate housing above.

The Sandwich Class Housing was notably higher quality than standard public estates, built to compete with private middle-class developments. Units were sold at slightly below market value with a five-year resale restriction. The scheme ended in 2000 when changes in the housing market made it unnecessary.

A System of Extraordinary Complexity

Understanding Hong Kong's public housing today requires navigating a bewildering array of programs, agencies, and eligibility requirements.

Two main bodies build and manage public housing: the Hong Kong Housing Authority, a statutory body that handles the majority of public housing, and the Hong Kong Housing Society, a nonprofit organization that operates independently. Each runs its own programs with its own rules.

Public Rental Housing estates—the most common type—are rented at discounted rates to low-income residents. Eligibility criteria vary based on whether applicants are families, elderly individuals, or single non-elderly adults. The last category faces the longest waits and lowest priority.

Home Ownership Scheme estates are typically built adjacent to or within rental estates, often identical in construction but designated for sale rather than rent. Buyers purchase at steep discounts but face restrictions on resale.

Green Form Subsidised Home Ownership flats are available only to "Green Form" applicants—essentially those already in or approved for public rental housing—and are priced even lower than standard Home Ownership Scheme units.

Interim Housing provides temporary accommodation for those awaiting placement in permanent public housing or displaced by disaster, fire, or redevelopment. Some interim housing reuses old blocks in existing estates; other developments use prefabricated building components.

The architectural variety is equally diverse. Over the decades, designers have produced dozens of distinct building types: H-blocks, I-blocks, twin towers, Harmony blocks in several variants, Trident designs, Cruciform layouts, Linear configurations, and the simply named "Non Standard" designs for irregular sites. Each type represents different thinking about density, efficiency, natural lighting, and livability.

The Waiting Game

Here is the central tension of Hong Kong public housing: demand vastly exceeds supply.

In 1998, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa pledged to reduce the average waiting time for public rental housing to three years by 2005. It was an ambitious promise. It was not kept.

As of September 2020, approximately one hundred and fifty-six thousand families were on the general waiting list for public rental housing, with another hundred thousand or so single non-elderly applicants waiting under a separate quota system. By July 2021, the average waiting time for general applicants had stretched to 5.8 years—the longest in more than two decades. More than a quarter-million people were on the waiting list.

Frank Chan, the Secretary for Transport and Housing, acknowledged it might take twenty years to substantially reduce waiting times.

Why has the government failed so consistently to meet its own targets? Since 2014, Hong Kong has never hit its target for building enough public flats. The public housing units actually provided in recent years accounted for only forty-seven percent of total new homes built—far short of the sixty percent target the government had set, and even further from the seventy percent target adopted in 2018.

The fundamental problem is land. Critics argue that without increasing the supply of developable land, the government will continue falling short no matter what targets it announces. In 2021, an executive from Sun Hung Kai Properties—one of Hong Kong's largest developers—suggested that ten-year targets lacked accountability. He proposed creating a committee to oversee progress, with government officials held personally responsible if targets weren't met.

The proposal went nowhere.

The Hidden Housing Crisis

When people cannot access public housing and cannot afford private apartments, where do they go?

Many end up in what are called "subdivided flats"—apartments illegally partitioned into tiny units, sometimes as small as fifty square feet, with shared bathrooms and kitchens. Others live in "bedspace apartments," essentially bunks in a room full of other bunks, or in rooftop structures, or in industrial buildings not zoned for residential use.

These living conditions would have been familiar to residents of the original Shek Kip Mei shantytown. Seventy years after the fire that launched public housing, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents live in spaces barely larger than the twenty-four square feet per person that the government allocated in 1954.

The government acknowledges the problem but frames it differently now than in the past. In recent years, officials have begun to prioritize economic considerations over meeting citizen demand for housing. Public housing is expensive to build and maintain. The government subsidizes rents heavily and recovers only partial costs through charges from car parks and shops within the estates.

There is an argument—one the government increasingly makes—that too much public housing distorts the market, discourages private development, and creates dependency. There is a counterargument that housing is a basic need and that market solutions have manifestly failed to provide affordable homes for a large portion of the population.

The debate continues. The waiting lists grow.

A Counterintuitive Finding

One detail from the research stands out. A 1988 crime survey found that crime rates were actually lower in Hong Kong's public housing estates than in private housing areas.

This cuts against assumptions common in many Western countries, where public housing is often associated with concentrated poverty and elevated crime. Hong Kong's experience suggests that dense, well-managed public housing integrated throughout a city can avoid the pathologies that plagued public housing experiments elsewhere.

Several factors may explain this. Hong Kong's public housing was never a last resort for only the most desperate. From the beginning, it housed a broad cross-section of working-class and lower-middle-class families. The estates were designed as self-contained communities with commercial amenities, not isolated projects cut off from economic activity. And the sheer scale of the program—housing nearly half the population—meant that public housing residents were Hong Kong's mainstream, not its marginalized underclass.

The Numbers Today

According to 2024 data, about thirty percent of Hong Kong's population lives in public rental housing, while another sixteen percent lives in subsidized home ownership housing—flats purchased through the various schemes that allow residents to buy at below-market prices. A small fraction, just under one percent, lives in temporary housing awaiting permanent placement.

Add it up and roughly forty-seven percent of Hong Kong residents live in some form of public or subsidized housing. That's down slightly from the forty-nine percent recorded in 2006, but the absolute numbers have grown as the population has increased.

The government's current ten-year target calls for four hundred and thirty thousand new housing units, with seventy percent public and thirty percent private. That translates to about three hundred thousand public housing units over the decade, or thirty thousand per year. Given the government's track record of missing previous targets, there is widespread skepticism that these numbers will be achieved.

What Remains

Mei Ho House still stands in Shek Kip Mei, a solitary H-shaped block preserved as a monument to where it all began. The building that once crammed desperate refugees into twenty-four-square-foot cubicles now houses a youth hostel and a museum. Tourists can book rooms and experience—in sanitized, nostalgic form—what life was like in Hong Kong's first public housing estate.

Around it, the Shek Kip Mei Estate has been extensively redeveloped. Modern towers rise where the original resettlement blocks once stood, offering residents amenities that would have seemed luxurious to the fire survivors of 1953: private kitchens, private bathrooms, elevators to every floor, air conditioning, broadband internet.

The physical transformation is remarkable. The waiting lists, however, tell a different story. Seventy years after that Christmas Day fire, Hong Kong still has not solved its housing problem. The solutions have evolved—from H-blocks to Harmony designs, from pure rental to ownership schemes, from urban estates to new towns built on reclaimed land. But demand continues to outpace supply. Families continue to wait years for a flat. And tens of thousands continue to live in conditions that echo the cramped, inadequate housing that public housing was supposed to eliminate.

Hong Kong's public housing program remains one of the most ambitious in the world. It has housed millions and transformed the physical landscape of the city. Whether it has truly solved the crisis that inspired it—or merely managed an ongoing failure—depends on how you measure success.