Vox
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2022
9:54 · 27M views · Aug 15, 2018
A Vox Borders explainer on Hong Kong's housing crisis, the least affordable market in the world, and the tiny cage homes and subdivided flats people squeeze into. It looks at why prices keep climbing and how land policy contributes.
Cited in housing and real estate threads as a vivid illustration of extreme scarcity and Hong Kong's land-price dynamics.
3 comments from Hacker News
In Hong Kong, it's not a problem of over-densification. There's loads of unused land, but the government is incentivised to keep it empty and not zone it for high-density residential. When they do sell off a small parcel of land for new development, they auction it off leading to obscene land prices. That's what OP means about there not being an incentive for the government to lower cost of living. The high cost of living is subsidising HK's notoriously low taxes. There's a pretty good YouTube video about it: this video Oh and to answer the question, the solution is to zone lots more high-density residential, sell a lot of land for less money, and stop subversively taxing the poorest citizens via high CoL. Tax businesses and the wealthy to make up for it. But they're not going to do that, because low taxes on businesses and the wealthy is their USP. Turns out when you optimise a city for business wellbeing at the expense of citizen wellbeing, then it impacts citizen wellbeing...
There's tons of videos on youtube of people excitedly moving into their tiny house or converted bus or whatever. They usually seem to be 200-500 sq ft affairs on 5-10 acres of land, so they aren't exactly solving the housing problem. There's a few in tiny apartments in cities to be fair. Anecdotally, most of these folks seem to move out of their tiny place in about a year or two because they're simply tired of not being able to do crazy things like stand up or stretch their arms out. I remember one series of increasingly distressing videos where a guy was financially tied up in some tiny property, got married, then started having kids. By the time they were finally able to unload the property on somebody else they had an infant sleeping in a closet and the husband was sleeping in a tent so their older daughter could sleep inside with their mother. I'm really not sure what problem the "Tiny House Movement" is trying to solve even if some of the solutions are kind of interesting. The variety of small living accommodations in Asian Cities seems far more interesting to me to be honest, because they're solving real problems of affordability, shelter and so on. Some of the tiniest places seem to be relatively shame-free dorm-like affairs in South Korea and Japan intended for people studying for various exams, but also used by a fair number of semi-permanent residents who lack the means to stay elsewhere. These places are cheap , maybe around $300-400 per month, but have tradeoffs l
This sounds a lot like how this Vox video [0] describes the situation in Hong Kong. Except without the intentionally established scarcity to keep prices and thus gov revenue up, leading to shitty living conditions. I'm not sure there is a way to perfectly set up incentives in the first place. The more important aspect seems to be culture: public officials actually wanting to serve the citizens & do good. [0] this video