In Hong Kong’s housing statistics, one unit equals one unit — whether 27 square metres or 60. This equation has hidden what has truly happened over the past thirty years.

The Hong Kong Housing Authority’s two new measures — the Elderly Owner Flat-to-Flat Exchange Plan and the White Form Rental Plan — represent a welcome shift toward making subsidised housing genuinely mobile. The direction is right, but effectiveness will depend on participation, matching, and the Government’s willingness to scale up implementation.

Drawing on nearly 40 years of data, the HKU Business School’s Hong Kong Economic Policy Green Paper 2026 reveals a serious ‘generational fault line’ in public housing welfare: younger generations now receive far less public housing support than older generations did at the same age. The authors call for sustained expansion of public housing supply to restore upward mobility for young people.

The 2025 Policy Address rightly pivots from a sole focus on public rental housing toward helping citizens become homeowners and rebuild the housing ladder, but its six measures — from a larger Home Ownership Scheme supply to a modest White Form rental pilot — are too small to break the impasse.

Hong Kong’s housing ladder has broken, leaving the homeownership rate far below peer economies at about 51%. The authors call for comprehensive reform — expanding HOS, emulating Singapore’s model, and coordinating housing, land, population, and economic policy.

Reviewing the 1998 Tenant Purchase Scheme’s three design flaws — illiquid units, fragmented management rights, and fire-sale pricing — the authors argue the Government must first unlock turnover in subsidised-sale flats before relaunching any improved version to help citizens climb the housing ladder.

Hong Kong’s subsidised housing resale market turned over at just 1% in 2024 — barely half the private market’s 2.2%. The authors argue the Government must urgently relax secondary-market quotas and launch a ‘flat-for-flat’ exchange scheme to rebuild the public-to-private housing ladder.

Hong Kong’s housing policy should not be driven by the public rental housing wait alone. The authors argue the subsidised housing shortage is far more severe and has misled society into a ‘public housing above all’ mindset, and call for a major expansion of subsidised housing and deeper housing reform.

Will expanding subsidised-sale housing crash the private market? Using economic theory and empirical data, the authors argue that fears of a price collapse from public housing reform are overblown — and that reform will likely increase both supply and demand.

Hong Kong’s land-sale and stamp-duty revenues have collapsed. Selling public rental housing units to tenants may be a better alternative than tax hikes or spending cuts.

The Housing Authority’s reform of the Well-off Tenants Policy marks a major step forward in addressing Hong Kong’s public-housing misallocation and the subdivided-flats crisis. The authors urge the Government to continue refining the policy — reviewing the rent-to-income ratio biennially and further tailoring the rent ladder for different income groups.

The authors argue that Hong Kong’s record-breaking prolonged economic downturn is closely tied to deep-seated flaws in housing policy, and that only a bold, systematic, decade-long reform blueprint — built around home ownership for all — can break the impasse.

Hong Kong is enduring its longest economic contraction on record. The authors trace its root cause to the 2002 ‘Suen Nine Measures’ and argue that comprehensive housing reform is the key to economic recovery.

Hong Kong’s well-off tenant policy lets high-income public housing tenants occupy scarce units at rents as low as 3–5% of their income, far below overseas norms. The data show the proposed reform is fair, modest, and urgently needed to shorten public rental housing wait times and curb the proliferation of subdivided flats.

High rents deter talent and investment despite R&D subsidies. The article calls for rapid housing supply expansion, rezoning, and public-housing reform.