While we’re waiting for the HK47 sentencing starting tomorrow…

…a Standard op-ed from last week. The author argues that prison sentences for landlords who fail to upgrade subdivided apartments would be excessive…

The ugly truth is that all possible solutions to this problem are tricky and contentious, not least because many wealthy and well-known Hongkongers have added to their fortunes by harvesting the very high yields of such flats…

The government’s proposed new policy will force landlords to upgrade their subdivided flats and it is understandable that the penalties for failing to do so will be harsh.

But the suggestion that offenders could be sentenced to up to three years in prison does seem draconian. After all, if the government had built sufficient public housing in the first place, there would never have been a demand for subdivided flats.

…subdivided flats were a free-market response to a severe shortage of housing for the poor and the downright indigent.

Without them, a large number of poor would have been forced to sleep outdoors.

(How does the involvement of ‘wealthy and well-known’ people make everything more ‘tricky and contentious’ exactly?)

If landlords’ negligence leads to fire hazards and fatalities, a prison sentence does not seem unreasonable. But he is basically right in saying that landlords did not create this problem. So who did?

The root cause of this shameful treatment was a brazen and calculated policy by the British to restrict the supply of land and drive up prices to a point where the poor could not afford a home.

This is a ‘brazen and calculated’ attempt to rewrite history. First of all, the colonial era ended 27 years ago. Post-1997 administrations have had ample time to ensure a proper supply of housing. Indeed, the colonial governments of the 1950s-90s built one new town – each housing several hundred thousand people – per decade in Tuen Mun, Shatin, Tin Shui Wai, etc. They did so thanks to a policy of ensuring a sufficient land supply. 

The rot set in following the signing of the Joint Declaration in the mid-80s, when Beijing officials demanded that the colonial government tightly restrict land sales. That triggered a huge build-up of fiscal reserves and a property bubble that exploded after the handover during the Asian financial crisis. After Tung Chee-hwa shelved his plan to resume adequate supply, subsequent administrations continued to restrict land sales and pushed housing prices back up to absurd levels. Today’s problem is strictly a post-handover one. And, as the author concludes, ‘policies continue to favor developers’.