Land shortage is no doubt the most pressing social and economic problem in Hong Kong. High land prices have channeled wealth into one dominant sector — property and related — and taken away incentives to innovate and venture into new enterprises. With the waiting time for public rental housing lengthening to a historic high of 5.3 years, and a record number of people living in poor conditions in subdivided units, increasing land and housing supply has become the most critical challenge facing Hong Kong’s leaders.
Historically, with more hills than flat land, Hong Kong has relied heavily on reclamation to increase its land supply. The sharp economic downturn at the turn of the century led the government to slow down drastically its land and public housing programs, resulting in today’s looming crisis.
The Land Supply Task Force appointed by the government laid out 18 options for increasing land supply, none of which is, as task force leader Stanley Wong Yuen-fai said, painless. Yet as Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor declared in late June, some of the options, such as taking away one of the golf courses in Fanling to produce 32 hectares of land, is “peanuts” compared to large-scale reclamation projects.
A careful reading of the consultation document issued by the task force shows that the government’s attention is trained on the Eastern Lantau Metropolis (ELM), a strategic long-term development project aimed at reclaiming 1,000 hectares of land in Hong Kong’s central waters, east of Lantau and west of Kau Yi Chau. It would create a new business district and accommodate up to 700,000 people.
The ELM was first announced by then chief executive Leung Chun-ying in his Policy Address in 2014. Yet despite repeated discussions at the Lantau Development Advisory Committee and the Development Panel of the Legislative Council, the government ran into such strong objections and skepticism from pro-conservation legislators that it failed to obtain funding of HK$227 million to undertake preliminary feasibility studies.
The government no doubt hopes that the public consultation organized by the task force would generate sufficient impetus to relaunch the project. While the outcomes of the consultation remain uncertain, Our Hong Kong Foundation, a think tank founded by former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, launched in early August an “Enhanced ELM”, or EELM proposal, recommending that the area of the proposed artificial islands be enlarged to 2,000 hectares to accommodate up to 1.1 million people.
The EELM plan is no doubt more visionary than that of the government. The foundation is also absolutely right that large-scale reclamation is the game changer that would enable Hong Kong to break out of its current capacity constraints. All social and economic indicators — transport bottlenecks, mass transit construction scandals, over-stretched public medical and health services, let alone acute land and housing shortage — all point to the fact that Hong Kong has reached a tipping point. It will either break out, or break down.
The foundation deserves to be applauded for encouraging Hong Kong people to think out of the box and reimagine the city’s future. Yet the huge expense — easily HK$100 billion — and long timeline involved mean that the project will take at least a decade before it could be completed under the best-case scenario.
Already localist and conservationist groups are accusing such a large-cale reclamation project to be damaging to Hong Kong’s coastlines and over-crowding Hong Kong’s central waters. It would be an unimaginably long process before such a gigantic project could obtain the necessary funding from LegCo.If we truly think out of the box, a much quicker and more cost-effective alternative would be to seek the central government’s permission, as Macao has done, to reclaim in mainland waters.
Two possible locations are either islets in Neilingding Yang, west of Lantau or islets to the south. Neilingding Island, which can be easily connected to Tuen Mun, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, has been mooted as a possibility. But it has been declared part of the Neilingding Island and Futian National Nature Reserve. Reclaiming close to Shenzhen could also affect Shenzhen’s own coastal reclamation plans.
Another possibility is Guishan Island to the south of Lantau. About 780 hectares in area, the distance between the northern tip of Guishan Island to the southernmost end of Lantau is only 4.8 km. The distance will be shorter after reclamation has enlarged the area of the island. Reclamation at Guishan could produce up to 2,000 hectares of land, which could be connected to Lantau by bridge and to various destinations in Hong Kong and Zhuhai by ferry.
With such a sizeable tract of land available, the possibilities for development are infinite. Planners could experiment with building a carbon-free, car-free future city; build much-needed public housing for those inadequately housed; develop new industries, parks and waterways between residential and commercial developments; and even relocate Hong Kong’s container ports, correctional facilities or universities to release prime sites and give colleges more space.
The Guishan Island is currently a tourism destination with a few thousand inhabitants. Provided support by the Zhuhai government and approval by the State Council is forthcoming, using the mainland’s advanced reclamation techniques, well tried and tested in reclamations in Xisha and Nansha Islands, reclamation up to 1,000 hectares or more could be completed in a few years, thus providing much-need land supply in the shortest space of time.
The beauty of reclamation in mainland waters is that it would steer clear of the protracted and highly politically charged funding process in Hong Kong. Reclamation could be undertaken by mainland experts in accordance with the mainland’s environmental and maritime rules, and leased to Hong Kong on completion.
The approval given by the State Council in 2009 for Macao to reclaim 361.65 hectares in mainland waters and to lease part of Hengqin Island provided useful precedents. The additional areas are administered by Macao under the “one country, two systems” model. There is no reason why the same arrangement cannot be extended to Hong Kong. With substantially more land for development, Hong Kong could reshape its future, become more integrated with the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and better positioned to contribute to China’s ongoing development and modernization.
