Vox‘s Johnny Harris looks at housing in Hong Kong, noting that it is rated the least-affordable housing market in the world. (At least the English-speaking world, China, Japan, and Singapore, which are the housing markets reviewed in Wendell Cox’s 14th International Housing Affordability Survey). Harris shows living conditions roughly similar to the 1890 tenements of New York City documented by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives.
Harris reveals that housing prices aren’t high because Hong Kong has run out of land. Instead, he notes, “Flying over Hong Kong, you start to see that, while yes, there’s a very dense urban landscape, but there’s also a whole lot of green space. Government land-use data says that 75 percent of the land in Hong Kong is not developed.”
Officially, Hong Kong’s population density is about 17,500 people per square mile, but demographer Cox’s survey of world urban areas estimates that the developed area has more than 66,000 people per square mile, about the same as Manhattan, but about twelve times more than the New York urban area as a whole.
Why is so much land left undeveloped? Harris learns that virtually all of the land in Hong Kong is owned by the government, with individuals or businesses getting 50-year leases. The government could allow people to build on the remaining land, thus reducing the density and making housing more affordable. It doesn’t, I suspect, because it fears that the region has too many people for private automobiles to work, so they rely on trains and foot travel. In other words, smart growth.
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The problem with this is that too many people can’t afford expensive luxury high-rise apartments, and they probably can’t afford to regularly ride trains either. So they live in tiny cells that have been subdivided out of regular apartments and then walk to work.
The city of San Francisco has about 17,500 people per square mile, and transportation there seems to work just fine. About 37 percent of commuters in the city use transit to get to work and about 43 percent drive. Of course, San Francisco is one of the least-affordable housing markets in the United States, and the urban-planning solution is to make it even denser.
Harris opines that Hong Kong is different from San Francisco and New York, which he suggests have run out of land. But he is wrong about that. According to the 2010 census, 70 percent of the six-county core San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara) is rural, while 52 percent of the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area and 70 percent of the combined New York statistical area is rural. The rural areas in the San Francisco Bay Area house just 20 people per square mile while the rural lands around New York have about 100 people per square mile. In these cases, the government doesn’t own most of the land, but it does forbid people to build on much of the rural area.
Hong Kong should provide a lesson for those who say that the solution to housing affordability problems is to build denser. Unfortunately, they seem to be too dense to learn it.
The land of Hong Kong that isn’t developed is mountainous and difficult and expensive to lay infrastructure on. Not without bulldozing everything and flattening it.
The real reason housing shot up in Hong Kong is because Mainland Chinese move to the spot in droves and buy up property to either reside or flip. Housing prices have tripled in a decade. Mainlanders are despised by Hong Kongers. They get pregnant and give birth in HK hospitals to take advantage of Hong Kong hospitals to have citizen children so they can stay. The ones that don’t stay buy up products in HK grocery stores to bring back, I guess they don’t trust the state owned enterprise.
To be honest, Hongkongers attribute anything bad that happened in Hong Kong to the interference of Chinese government.
Some hongkongers believe that without Chinese government, they will live happily ever, even though the British government had not given them the right to vote for their Chief Exceutive before China took over Hong Kong. Nevermind despite the fact polls showed Hong Kongers prefered British rule. Namely the Communist party now handpick politicians in Hong Kong; democratic protests are ubiquitous.
In 1997 Hong Kong was handed back over to China with the agreement that Beijing would allow “50 years of autonomy” under a One Country Two Systems setup. However, this has recently been disrupted by incidents such as the abduction of local booksellers who sold books that criticized Communism.
Hong Kong is also losing its competitiveness on the global stage. What was once the premier shipping and financial hub of the region, Hong Kong is now losing those titles to Shenzhen and Shanghai respectively. As a percentage of China’s overall economy, HK only contributes 3%, down from 19% two decades ago.
Underpinning all of this dissention are the sky high property prices due to a lack of land supply (controlled by the government). Between spitting on the streets, not queuing for anything, and allowing their children to urinate pretty much anywhere, you can see how this might irk the residents of Hong Kong.
So you can see that the dynamic between HK and China is quite complex but in the end, Hong Kong-ers must always remember that by 2047 the one country 2 systems agreement will be over and they’ll go back to the mother-ship.
San Francisco is built on steep slopes, some over 40 percent. No reason Hong Kong can’t be built the same way. Besides, Harris points out that much of the undeveloped land isn’t steep.
People in San Francisco and Hong Kong both try to blame housing problems on demand issues: outsiders, Airbnb, etc. But that’s a diversion; the real issue is supply, not of housing but of land. If developers have land to build on, they can meet just about any level of demand.
Does the author know the difference between the city of NYC and San Francisco and the NYC Metro area and the San Francisco Metro area? The Author claims that Harris’ statement is wrong about NYC and San Fran but then give statistics on their Metro areas NOT the Cities themselves. How does that dispute Harris’ claims?
Harris opines that Hong Kong is different from San Francisco and New York, which he suggests have run out of land. But he is wrong about that. According to the 2010 census, 70 percent of the six-county core San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara) is rural, while 52 percent of the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area and 70 percent of the combined New York statistical area is rural.
Hong Kong Island is mountainous and has a population density of 16,390 /km2, yet it wasn’t bulldozed and flattened to accommodate that density. The problem with Hong Kong is that the government designates huge tracts of land as parkland, a holdover from British rule. There’s plenty of viable land to build on. It’s just that the government won’t let anyone build on it.