Thread by @davidfickling

Look at these two maps. The red bits are built-up areas.

Can you guess which city has the world's least-affordable housing market, and which has been introducing measures to curb an oversupply of apartments? (thread follows)
bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/ar…

My column today with the great @nishagopalanhk is about two Asian cities that are obsessed with comparing themselves, Hong Kong and Singapore.

There's an odd lack of interest in one of the most striking areas of contrast, though: housing policy. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

As @ShawnaKwan points out, while Carrie Lam's extradition law was the spark that ignited the Hong Kong protests, its eye-watering property prices have fuelled the blaze, along with the erosion of civil rights and denial of suffrage: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

The cities once weren't so different. When Singapore became independent from Britain in 1959 just 9% of the population was in public housing. The residential area around the modern downtown was notoriously overcrowded and insanitary.

So the city embarked on one of the most ambitious public housing programs in history.

Blocks put up by the Housing Development Board sprung up, and 79% of people now live in HDB-built homes.

HDB flats are spacious, affordable, and maybe even losing their utilitarian image.

Hong Kong wasn't so different. During the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution migrants streamed over the border from China and established squatter settlements around Kowloon and the New Territories, like the notoriously overcrowded and lawless Kowloon Walled City.

Those squatter settlements, and the spirit of self-reliant striving associated with them, became a sort of emblem of Hong Kong, the "Lion Rock spirit" referenced in the recent trail of lights protest to the summit of the crag that overlooks Kowloon: scmp.com/sport/outdoor/…

After the 1967 anti-government riots the colonial authorities actually took a leaf out of Singapore's book and embarked on a mass public housing program.

But it failed to keep pace with population growth. The share of public-built housing is 44% vs. 79% in Singapore.

The problem goes deeper than that, to how the two places use their land.

Hong Kong's total area is 1,107sq km and Singapore, 724sq km.

But Hong Kong squeezes its 7.5m people in a built-up area of 285sq km.

Singapore's 5.6m people have almost twice the built-up area, 518sq km.

A common canard is "but Hong Kong is all mountains so there's simply *no more available space* you can build on".

This is true of Hong Kong Island, but the New Territories, which makes up the bulk of Hong Kong's land area, is mostly the pancake-flat valley of the Shenzhen River:

Have a look at the aerial map and explain to me the weird coincidence that topography is impossible on the Hong Kong side of the border but just fine on the Chinese side, where millions live in a zone which Hong Kong uses for sparse farms and two-storey concrete detached homes.

There *is* a problem with developing the New Territories but it's very little to do with topography, and very much to do with politics and corruption.

Most of the land is controlled by the Heung Yee Kuk, a politically-powerful rural landlords' mafia: economist.com/china/2017/08/…

I'm not using that term figuratively. For the connections between the Heung Yee Kuk, triads and the pro-Beijing mobsters who beat up people in a Yuen Long shopping centre this summer, @elson_tong has the goods: hongkongfp.com/2019/07/27/exp…

Then you have the huge rural land banks held by some of Hong Kong's property tycoons.

The biggest four alone have 10sq km on their books. They're reluctant to develop it because they must pay a "conversion premium" to upgrade to residential zoning and drive a very hard bargain:

To put this in context:

All the urban area on Hong Kong Island totals 20 sq km. About 1.5m people live there.

Big four developers' rural land bank is 10 sq km.

"Brownfield land" (junkyards etc in Heung Yee Kuk-run bits of the New Territories) is 12 sq km.

Hong Kong's beloved country parks cover ~440 sq km.

Other land, mostly farms, is ~380 sq km.

The Hong Kong government's main plan to deal with its housing crisis is a bonkers idea to build an $80bn, 10 sq km artificial island archipelago:

Also on the topography thing: Even in the hilly bits of Hong Kong, it's just not as big of a problem as people make out.

The Mid-Levels are as steep as anywhere in Hong Kong and are covered in tower blocks!

As this structural engineer points out, building on steep slopes is a pretty well-established practice and Hong Kong has some of the world's best expertise in this field.

https://twitter.com/_Simon_K/status/1171712327311216640?s=19

The city has catalogued every slope in the territory and monitors them for landslips after heavy rainfall. To my knowledge there haven't been any major problems with tower block foundations being damaged/washed away since the early 1970s.

The good reason for Hong Kong to take on its land barons and build sufficient housing is simply that it's good policy to alleviate the crushing housing poverty that leads people to live in "coffin homes" in one of the world's richest cities: theatlantic.com/photo/2017/05/…

Here's the bad reason: Singapore is a democracy on paper, but the People's Action Party has won every election since the mid-1950s and rules over a docile population that couldn't be more different to Hong Kong's restive citizenry.

If Hong Kong's undemocratic leaders want to start reducing the public anger that's increasingly threatening to bring the territory into conflict with their de jure masters in Beijing, they need to borrow Singapore's trick and create a compliant class of homeowners. (ends)

Usual PS: Do read the column! bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…