Radical reforms needed to end the 'Rising PRH waiting time' myth 20220520

Radical reforms needed to end the 'Rising PRH waiting time' myth

After the Hong Kong Housing Authority (HKHA) announced the latest Public Rental Housing (PRH) statistics, showing that the 'average waiting time' has risen to a new high of 6.1 years, cliché-ridden editorials predictably rattled the same plattitudes about the 'need to increase supply for PRH' to address the problem, such as:

SCMP: Average waiting time for public housing flat in Hong Kong rises to 6.1 years, highest in more than 2 decades

The Standard: Waiting time for public housing rises to 6.1 years, hits 23-year high

The truth of the matter is not what it seems as claimed the housing bureaucracy (which is primarily responsible for the crisis), and the uncritical media. We have addressed this fallacy in extensive detail in the following article:

"HK’s Ever Ballooning Public Housing Addiction Cycle 05/2021" 

1. Lowering thresholds leads to perpetual shortage in housing welfare
2. Drastic cure: cut income limits, halt all public housing building
3. Wanton lifting of welfare thresholds crowds out private market

as well as some earlier writings (in Chinese only):

《公屋改革面面觀─結構性自我膨脹  2014年9月》English translation

《公屋改革面面觀─公屋「豪宅化」2014年10月》English translation

In essence, the long 'waiting time' phenomenon is a self staged smoke and mirrors game, which resulted solely from the ever rising income ceiling for public housing applicants, which significantly outpaces the increase in median household income for the population at large.

As a result, ever large swathes of the population fall into the eligibility net, thereby lengthening the waiting time unnecessarily. Coupled with this, the constant growth in average size of flats occupied by PRH occupants, the pursuit for luxurious standard for what should be a welfare product, have attracted even more applicants seeking this freebie.

The resultant rent seeking free-for-all only punished the tax payers and the genuine hard up applicants who are edged out of the housing market while the bureaucrats and rent seeking committees/advisors build their empires. In the meantime, the cancerous growth in public housing removes our ability to buy our own homes in the private market, thus becoming permanent slaves to the bureaucracy... a sad outcome indeed unless the reforms we outlined time and again are implemented.