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300,000 units are required by 2025 Tackle the challenge with no delay

According to our report published in April last year, we estimated that To solve the housing shortage in the short run, we need to confront the
about 75,000 private housing units will be completed between 2021 challenge head-on. Comparing Hong Kong’s housing crisis to a
and 2025 (Decisive Moment—Can Hong Kong Save Itself from the situation of water shortage, rather than digging a new well, which
Land and Housing Supply Crisis?, 2021). According to the housing means developing non-spade-ready sites without infrastructures from
construction programmes of the Housing Authority (HA) and the Hong scratch, a more feasible solution is to dig the existing well faster and
Kong Housing Society (HKHS), only 107,000 public housing units will deeper. This means we should compress the development cycle by
be completed. In other words, based on current projections, only removing barriers, speed up the development of spade-ready or
approximately 180,000 public and private housing units will be semi-spade-ready sites, establish clear and quantifiable targets,
completed by 2025. This is insufficient to make up for past supply and catch up at full throttle.
gap and meet future demand.
We estimate that approximately 230,000 public and private housing
Since the LTHS was first presented in 2013, the Government has not units will be delivered between 2026 and 2030. After reviewing each
achieved the housing targets in any of the past eight years. As a result, project, near 120,000 units are identified to be at the later stage of
approximately 120,000 public and private housing units are in arrears. development. If barriers are removed, 120,000 units can be
To fill the shortfall, the Government must add 120,000 more units completed ahead of schedule by 2025.
to the current estimated 180,000 units, delivering 300,000 public Subsequently, the Government must continue to accelerate the
and private housing units in total by 2025—that is 60,000 units per progress of the Lantau Tomorrow Vision and Northern Metropolis,
year. This supply target falls between the 85,000 units proposed by the which are scheduled to be completed after 2030. In the longer term,
former Chief Executive Mr Tung Chee Hwa and the 43,000 units we have proposed 9 Potential Development Areas (PDAs) for further
proposed in the latest LTHS annual progress report.
study in a report published in 2021, titled Building a Global City of the
Future—Envisioning Sustainable Urbanisation of the New Territories. It
is estimated that over 3,000 hectares of developable land will be
available in the PDAs.

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