'Many benefit from hotel rooms-turned-apartments'
A community group representative on Wednesday urged the government to revisit its decision to stop accepting new applications for a scheme that subsidises the use of hotel and guesthouse rooms as transitional housing. The Housing Bureau earlier announced it is discontinuing the pilot scheme that was introduced under the pandemic, citing factors like a recovery in the tourism industry and small room sizes.  But the Society for Community Organisation (SoCO), which operates a project under the scheme, said the rooms are popular among single and non-elderly applicants who're waiting for a public housing unit.  "There are up to 22,000 public housing units every year, and priority is given to the elderly under the points system. So it normally takes 10 to 20 years for non-elderly one-person applicants to get a flat," SoCO’s community organiser, Ng Wai-tung, told an RTHK programme.   "The hotel scheme kind of meets the housing need of such applicants given the scarce public housing supply. So we hope there will be new housing schemes to accommodate these applicants in future." Speaking on the same programme, lawmaker Scott Leung also said the scheme should not be scrapped as it had provided support for non-elderly singletons.  Apart from hotel and guesthouses, he said officials can also consider repurposing industrial units and turning them into transitional housing.  A total of nine projects were approved under the pilot scheme, providing 816 rooms that have independent toilets but no cooking facilities.