So whilst politically I agree, practically I am unsure there is no land speculation: A waterfront view remains valuable in and of itself, no matter what.
The buildings that do exist are ~50 stories even though that's not optimal because of the typhoon situation. So constructive cost is high because government does not release enough land for development.
The rents are high because someone wants it that way. It's not a land scarcity problem IMO.
Also the government and the upcoming merge with China is strange in itself.
Many of those people are now likely in worse shape effectively renting a cage sized bed, but now paying the governments cut on top of whatever black market shenanigans goes on in both the slum housing and kowloon.
>The Kowloon Walled City was exempt and remained under the control of Qing China.
https://www.thecollector.com/kowloon-walled-city-lawlessness...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_leases_in_Hong_Kong#V...
The problems are wholly on the supply side, where either
- there are bad laws that lead to any of the following, or - developers legally or illegally cooperate to suppress supply
- landlords cooperate to push up rents or reduce quality.
- investors use land or housing units as speculative assets
- normal people want to use their primary residence as a way to build wealth, so politically support measure that artificially inflate their property values. Individually, this is not a problem, but when everyone does it, the system breaks.
The goal is to design a system where all of the above doesn't happen. A very big task.
P.S. I don't know anything about HK.
I contrast that to places like the USA and Canada that have huge amounts of area but policies that encourage inefficient land usage.
The cool thing about leases is that you can change the cost of the lease periodically, which ensures that the value of the land does not accrue purely to the person occupying it.
Reminds me of the old macro economist joke: There are 4 types of economies, developed economy, developing economy, Japan, and Argentina. Maybe HK should be added to that joke...