Government flags clearer picture over public housing
The Secretary for Housing, Winnie Ho, on Saturday said the government now has a much clearer picture about how to supply sufficient public housing over the next decade, but that it still needs to work hard to solve housing problems in the short-term. She made the remarks on the RTHK programme 'Your Home Address', where senior officials discuss government policies. Ho said there is more land readily available when compared to 2010, and property market conditions have changed, helping authorities to plan for future public housing supply. But she added that while the 2023 Policy Address outlined that there would be enough land to build about 410,000 public housing units by 2034, the government still needed to take immediate action to help those who are on the public housing waiting list.    “In the current five years, the land is still not enough. I can only meet one third of the demand that I have to catch up with and in the next five years I have the remaining two thirds,” she said. “But if I can provide [subdivided unit residents] with light public housing - which is a very, very important policy in the 2022 Policy Address which we carried on in the 2023 - the light public housing can offer them much lower rent.” The housing secretary also noted the government would be very careful to strike a balance between public and private housing supply, over concerns that the property market could be dragged down by an oversupply of public housing. In February's Budget, the financial secretary Paul Chan scrapped all property cooling measures for private housing. The so-called "spicy" measures were first introduced more than a decade ago to combat property speculation.