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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

Amazing how in the 4th-most dense place in the world[0], there could be such a thing as an abandoned village!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

Surprisingly only 24% of Hong Kong is developed "built-up" area. The rest is mostly forested. This also means that despite the density being broadly equivalent to Singapore on that list, it is actually much more densely populated in the areas where people live and work.

Hong Kong has a mountainous topography. Of the total land area of 1,111 km 2, 24.3% (270 km2) is built-up area, with the remaining 75 .7% (841 km 2) being not-for-development or non-built-up area consisting mainly of country parks, wetland, reservoirs, fish ponds, etc

https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr17-18/english/panels/dev/papers/d...

Yes. That means if we accounted for that. Compare to Number 1 on the list where Macau has no such issue. Hong Kong would take the Top Spot as the most populated place on the planet.

Government policy and moneyed interests have been aligned since the british to restrict land use to keep property prices high and buy political support of ancestors of indigenous residents through free handout of tiny plots of land for low density housing to the male descendants. All of the people that bought into the overpriced housing market also want prices to stay high.

Hong Kong land use is fascinating and the government's Planning Department provides a great tool to explore how land is used and for what purpose: https://www.pland.gov.hk/pland_en/info_serv/open_data/landu/

The total area used by transport (71 sq km) is very close to the total area used for all types of residential (80 sq km). Hong Kong has 733 sq km of woodland and forest.

I wonder if HK could otherwise go Chongqing with their mountains, building the city up on them, or maybe blowing them up like they did in Lanzhou? It’s nice that they don’t, though.

In parts they do: the Hong Kong Island side has housing all the way to Victoria Peak and public escalators etc to serve it. The scenery isn't quite as dramatic as Chongqing though, and it's much less dense (particularly the upper levels are luxury/heritage houses, not apartments), so no monorails zipping through buildings etc.

I’ve been up the escalators before, it doesn’t feel anything like CQ though. A lot of the mountains just don’t seem big enough or at a grade that would allow for housing all the way up (like Victoria peek or west Vancouver). They might be able to blow them up or terrace them.

Most Hong Kongers agree it’s nice that they don’t. The nature parks are treasured. It’s also a false dichotomy because it’s not about “housing or nature”. There is plenty of brownfield land but in the New Territories it would be politically challenging to develop on it because it would mean buying or forcing out the owners who have rights to the land because of the legacy system of male heirs.

They already blow up small part of mountains or filled up marsh. Typically Yuen Long area.

A lot of Chinese municipalities have lots of rural land, they can even encompass multiple counties if that makes any sense. A few even have sane ghost cities (like kangbashi in ordos) that are severely under populated.

HK is mostly mountainous, so there are really dense parts between the mountains (which is cool when you have a dense but not large area surrounded by hills, like a university I visited). In this case, they are talking about an island, not connected via a bridge but a ferry, so it makes sense that life would be tough.

A lot of these areas are remote via the road network, or on tiny little islands, or sometimes within the Frontier Closed Area separating Hong Kong and China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Closed_Area

Open your maps app and go into satellite view. North of the main area most of Hong Kong is surprisingly green and unpopulated (until you hit the border with Shenzen).

I spent some time in India years ago and remember being amazed that a country with over a billion people could have so much vast open beautiful countryside. It’s incredible how much population can fit into a few (very) dense areas.

A substantial proportion of Hong Kong is entirely undeveloped land.

Likewise, I never expected that there would be a car-free village in Hong Kong. It's peaceful and quiet and laid-back: exactly what you wouldn't expect in Hong Kong.

My uneducated guess: the denser, convenient and efficient a city is, the harder it will be to maintain that level of comfort in the outskirts or remote places and people will progressively move to the concentrated areas.

We often hear people arguing that having cheap broadband in all local areas is just impossible, and I read it as "no young adult will want to live in those areas when they've the choice to move out on their own". Broadband being just one example.

I can shed some light on this. Most of these villages began their demise around the middle to late middle of the last century, before or during the upsurge of the economy that would lead to the city's boom times. Times were very tough, especially out in the sticks, so those that could move abroad, or send their kids abroad, did. That is a large part of why you have a huge ex-Hong Kong community in the UK, Canada, Australia, etc. Entire villages cleared out.

The thing is, they moved but most often retained land rights. So those villages fell into disrepair as people moved but the houses and plots of land usually belong to families that have lived abroad for one, two or three generations now. They could be developed but so far there's little incentive for people to do so, despite the high property prices (those that were very successful abroad instead bought property in Hong Kong's new towns and have seen asset values skyrocket).

Hong Kong's government has historically been very good at providing services for the outlying areas. The many villages that did not end up abandoned have for decades had all the amenities, with stable power, clean water, fiberoptic broadband and often gas as well.

Don't they have adverse possession laws that would clear the land rights after a decade or so ? (UK and most countries have, I have expected HK to have to)

I'm not sure about adverse possession, but my understanding is that the church behind Cheung Kong Centre is the only place in Hong Kong that privately owns land rather than leasing land from the government for 99 years. It would be better to sort out efficient use of land before the leases need renewal, but at least there's a mechanism to reclaim truly unused land.

No, in these cases the right to build one house lasts for the duration of one male heir since 1972. There are also restrictions on the conditions of sale if I’m not mistaken, which makes it more difficult to sell off to big developers.

Yup. I came from a small town of 300 people. Of my graduating class of 11, 1 stayed put and the rest moved to more urban areas.

There's just a bunch of issues with being semi remote.

Unless you can land remote work (good luck) jobs are basically have a family farm, work in the school, or work for a state agency maintaining roads, or commute for an hour to a city with more jobs.

Then there's the lack of services, it's basically "want food, entertainment, hospital care? Welp, you are going to have to travel for an hour to get any of that". You pretty much have to leave the town if you want more than a high school education.

Quiet literally the only thing going on in the city is high school sports.

But hey, with small towns that also generally means that everyone knows everyone. Which can be good if you like community, but also can be real bad if you don't want to live where everyone has their nose in everyone else's business.

But then, that was a small town. There's a large number of "communities" where instead of farmers putting their house close together they keep the "homes on the range". Which, as you can imagine, takes people that want isolation to want to live in those places.

They look like beautiful places to live, there just isn't the infrastructure or economy to support them. Which, admittedly, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

CNN reported that... so maybe double check their claims?

2024 and people still blindly believe what CNN is "reporting". Unbelieveable

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