City shamed by caged homes and subdivided flats, so Government sets out to apply Band-Aid

^{Sub-divided flats and cage homes are a blight on Hong Kong. Government has no plan to eliminate them.}

The rich get richer and the poor get shafted. Many residents applauded when the Government announced it would study the plight of poor people living squalid lives in caged homes and subdivided flats. That a city so wealthy should allow this to go on is nothing short of scandalous. Callous and unscrupulous landlords rip off our most desperate people. The Government connives and enables.

The latest round in the shameful saga comes with the report of a government-appointed taskforce on tenancy controls for subdivided flats. Instead of taking a holistic approach, aiming to eliminate the entire problem with boldness, the Government opted for a bandaid. The way to solve this issue is for the Government to show the same boldness that its British forebears did last century when faced with massive housing problems. The Government should be building transitional housing on brownfield sites for the poor now in caged homes and subdivided flats. These would be pre-fab blocks providing temporary accommodation for the underprivileged until they can move into public housing. About 99,000 households are reported to be living in these awful conditions. Helping them should not be beyond a Government that has $1,051,000,000,000 in reserves (July last year).

^{Life in a subdivided flat. No wonder some people run amok. All photos: Internet}

Caged homes and subdivided flats should be banned, made illegal. So should nano-flats, another issue that makes Hong Kong disgusting in the eyes of advanced countries. But our pussy-footing officials with their pay packets of hundreds of thousands a month can come up only with another taskforce study.

They asked Dr William Leung Wing-cheung, a retired banker, to head a Taskforce For Study of Tenancy Control of Subdivided units. Dr Leung’s team filed their report last week. They shouldn’t be blamed because the bureaucrats gave them such a limited brief.

^{For most people, this is shocking. For the poor woman, it is normal.}

The tens of thousands of subdivided flats in Hong Kong should be subjected to rent controls so tenancies cannot go up more than 15 per cent, the report said, dutifully coming out with what the bureaucrats wanted to hear. Rent controls should be tied to an existing index tracking the general market. Dr Leung defended the 15 per cent cap even though it is higher than the 10 per cent ceiling for a separate mechanism regulating public housing rents. “(Subdivided units) are not provided by the Government. The owners of SDUs are actually ordinary citizens so they have no obligation to help subsidise housing for the low-income group, ” Dr Leung somewhat insensitively said. His team also recommended that SDU leases should have a fixed period of two years with the tenant having the right to renew for a further two years.

Such blinkered bureaucratic thinking will not solve a matter that shames Hong Kong in the eyes of much of the world. It will just perpetrate the problem. Chief Executive Carrie Lam and Secretary for Transport and Housing Frank Chan, this is not good enough.