The World’s Metropolitan areas are some of the most expensive places to live in the world. Being from Southern California when expensive cities come to mind, I think of place such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and even New York City. But being in the bubble of where I have grown up I have not bothered to look beyond horizons and look abroad. Cities such as Sidney and Singapore dwarf housing and rental costs of the US cities I listed. But, yet none of these places compare to the astronomically high costs of living that take place in Hong Kong. Hong Kong leads the world in average housing costs by more than double the second closet. To put it in a perspective if the average house in the United States were to cost $50,000, it would cost $980,000 in Hong Kong. The price points between the two have an absurdly large gap. This take no account for square footage, in which the average house or apartment in Hong Kong is only 140 sqaure feet.
People in Hong Kong are forced to live in these shoeboxes not because the country is so small because of how inefficient they are. All land in Hong Kong is owned by its government, with the exception of one church built by the British in the 1800s. Since government the government has control over all the land, they decide all zoning areas. Currently only 3.7% of all of Hong Kong is zoned for dense urban housing. Over 75% of the land of Hong Kong is currently undeveloped but there is no plan for it to be. The government has no pressure to build any housing.
Currently Hong Kong has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world, also ranked the worlds freest economy. This has caused massive amounts of foreign companies to flock to Hong Kong to develop or re locate business. This has caused land values to inflate massively, and they provide Hong Kong with most of its money, allowing them to have low taxes. But the aftermath of all of this is the problem of high housing costs.
Hong Kong is one of the most interesting economies on the planet, and these housing prices are so beyond what could be expected nearly anywhere else. As China continues cracking down, I would not be surprised if these housing prices improve, as China has a tendency to overdevelop land instead of underdevelop. This could be good for these struggling residents, but it is unknown.
Wow, I never knew about this housing issue in Hong Kong. I really like that you wrote about this and expanded your website's zoning and development theme to issues outside of the United States. I can't believe how how housing prices and how low square footage is in Hong Kong.