Our Hong Kong Foundation (“OHKF”) has launched the third report of its Land and Housing Research Series today. The report intricately analyses defects in the design of the existing public housing mechanism and its associated inefficiencies. These include a severe lack of opportunity for PRH tenants to move between units, unsustainable burden on public finance, etc. In response, OHKF believes that housing policy must be transformed to become homeownership-oriented. This can ameliorate issues derived from income disparity and intergenerational poverty. To share wealth with the people, the report recommends that the government implement the “Subsidised Homeownership Scheme”, with prices of public housing units linked to the development costs and the unpaid premium capped at the date of occupation and thus delinked with the fluctuating market value.

As a continuation of OHKF’s advocacy report “From Large-Scale Reclamation to an Ideal Home” published in April this year, the second part of this report continues to explore issues relating to land supply. It proposes short, medium and long-term solutions to the severe land shortages faced by the city. In the short to medium-term, OHKF recommends implementing a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) scheme to release the development potentials of privately-owned land and increase the supply of housing. In the long-term, the report stresses again that the ideal solution is large-scale reclamation outside Victoria Harbour to create large, flat and high-quality developable land and build a significant land reserve.