Last month, the Hong Kong Government changed the site of nine private buildings into publicly funded housing sites
One of them has eyebrows, but it will be started next year due to the land grant procedure. Rehabilitation is still delayed, and public opinion is built on agricultural land. The Hong Kong Government must speed up the land grant procedures to ease the building shortage.
It takes 7 years to build a house with cooked land
The property prices are high and the public is eager for HOS flats. In particular, the Hong Kong Government has changed the HOS pricing mechanism last year to link with the affordability of the public. The price of new HOS flats has been reduced from 30% to 52% to attract more people to apply. This is reflected in the over-subscription of new HOS flats in the past two periods of more than 60 times, hitting record highs.
The demand for new HOS flats is large, but there is a lack of land. To meet the needs of the public, the Hong Kong Government has re-designed nine private residential plots for public housing projects last year. Although the government has made a mistake, the project has not been able to start construction due to the approval process. It is said that the project of the HS in Anderson Road is still in the process of granting land. It will be postponed until next year to start construction. It will be completed in 2025, which is a one-year delay.
The nine plots of Anderson Road and Kai Tak are all mature sites, that is, the land has been properly planned. There is no need for land resumption, demolition, site formation or additional infrastructure. Government departments are still entangled in the public’s urgent need for housing. Develop land procedures. It is hard to imagine that the Hong Kong Government intends to cite the Lands Resumption Ordinance to reclaim the developer’s idle farmland to build a public housing estate. It will be entangled in the land grant procedure.
The Real Estate Developers Association has complained earlier that land development has always been subject to lengthy and complicated administrative, consulting and approval procedures in various departments of the Hong Kong Government. If it involves agricultural land, it will involve 10 to 20 due to the problems of rezoning, infrastructure and land premium. After many years, it is only necessary to start construction.
According to the existing regulations, each housing project has to comply with the statutory requirements of the planning, building and land administration system. The Planning Department, the Architectural Services Department and the Lands Department, which are responsible for the approval process, have a total floor area, site coverage and building height. There are differences in the definitions, and it takes a long time for the documents to be reviewed and reviewed.
Therefore, developers hope that the Hong Kong Government can set up a task force to co-ordinate the examination and approval of the conversion of farmland from raw land to mature land, formulate uniform standards, simplify the procedures, and speed up the approval process in order to release more land for building houses as soon as possible.
Call for a task force to simplify the procedures for granting land
In the next ten years, there are still 67,000 gangs of public housing land. In addition to the need for more channels, the Hong Kong Government must change its mindset. There must be a new set of plans for the approval of land processing. Minimize time and cost-effectively, but don’t ignore safety and justice, and strive for efficiency and procedural balance. If the Hong Kong Government does not change the existing land-building process, it will continue to sigh, even if it reaches the land, it will be difficult to solve the housing needs of the people.