The journey's on to carve out HK's new chapter

With John Lee Ka-chiu’s resounding win in the 2022 chief executive election, experts from various professional groups have called for the next HKSAR government’s policies to be executed at both the administrative and legislative levels to ensure they’re more effectively enforced. Oswald Chan, Su Zihan and Ao Yulu report from Hong Kong.

Resolving Hong Kong's acute housing and land supply problem, upgrading the people's livelihoods, and making the special administrative region more competitive on the world stage are among the cornerstones of chief executive-elect John Lee Ka-chiu's blueprint as he sets out to begin a new chapter for the city in the next five years.

Lee aims to create a task force that would submit plans within the first 100 days of his administration to speed up the construction of public rental flats. He proposes allowing those on the long list of public housing applicants to move into new flats in certain projects even before community facilities or transport services are in place, saying this would shorten their waiting time by a year.

As of December, there were about 152,000 general applications for public rental housing on the waiting list, according to the Housing Department. The average waiting time is six years — the longest in nearly a quarter of a century.

Lee also suggests setting up a steering committee on land and housing supply to coordinate with policy bureaus and departments and supervise the implementation of land development projects. He and his team would explore building more road and rail networks to stimulate development in rural areas.

"We would like to see the new government explore ways to streamline administrative procedures and the construction process to expedite the development cycle," says Nelson Wong Chi-fai, head of research at global real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle in Hong Kong.

For land-starved Hong Kong, resuming land seems to be the most feasible way to deal with the pressing shortage problem. But the government has made little progress in tackling the issue in the past few years. It is estimated there are more than 1,600 hectares of brownfield sites that are underutilized. Due to the scattered private land ownership and the difficulties in modifying leases, conducting a full review of the matter is critical to boosting land supply.

"The land development process should be streamlined to cover various regulations, such as the Town Planning Ordinance, the Land Resumption Ordinance and the Environmental Impact Assessment Ordinance," suggests Chiu Kam-kuen, greater China international director and chief executive at Cushman & Wakefield.

The Land Resumption Ordinance, in particular, should be refined to speed up resettlement and compensation for existing land users. By consolidating and merging the current use of brownfields, it can allow brownfield sites to be released and used for other development projects, he says.

Lau Chun-kong, managing director at Colliers Hong Kong, would like to see strong execution powers in dealing with compensation for the resumption of brownfield sites. He suggests the new SAR administration charge land premiums at standard rates for the redevelopment of agricultural lots, evaluate the land premium valuation at market rates, and conduct early processing and approval of land exchange applications to accelerate the land exchange process to increase land supply.