By Alex Low
The Hong Kong housing crisis reflects land governance and planning priorities rather than physical scarcity. And this could be a direct result of its past. If history teaches us anything, it’s that few forces have been as persistent as Britain’s appetite for trade.
By the early nineteenth century, British demand for Chinese goods such as silk, porcelain and tea had grown insatiable, while the Qing Empire resisted opening its markets on British terms.
That impasse culminated in the First Opium War. Defeated by superior naval power, the Qing ceded Hong Kong Island under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, marking the start of British rule and the city’s integration into the global economy.
A Matter Of History
What began as a colonial outpost would transform into one of the world’s most significant financial centres and commercial ports. Yet Hong Kong’s rise was never a simple story of geography, luck, or destiny.
From the outset, how land was owned, released and monetised became the central lever for governing the city. Scarcity was not merely encountered, it was produced. The structures established during British rule laid the groundwork for a system in which land functioned less as a social good than as a fiscal instrument.
Hong Kong is often described as constrained by mountains and sea, where density is unavoidable and sky-high property prices seem inevitable — a narrative hardened into common sense. But it obscures a more uncomfortable reality. Hong Kong’s land crisis is not simply the outcome of geography, but the product of deliberate political and economic design. To understand the city’s housing emergency, and the mounting risks it poses to safety and liveability, we must first dismantle this myth of inevitability and examine how scarcity itself has been manufactured.
If You Can Build It…
The claim that the Hong Kong housing and land crisis is an unavoidable consequence of geography does not withstand scrutiny. Official land-use data consistently shows that only a minority of Hong Kong’s total land area is urbanised, with vast portions classified as rural land, woodland, shrubland, grassland or otherwise undeveloped.
Nearly 40 per cent of the territory is designated as country parks or other protected areas, reflecting planning priorities rather than physical impossibility. While these protections serve environmental and recreational purposes, they also significantly constrain the amount of land legally available for housing. Scholars note that Hong Kong’s public discourse often conflates undeveloped land with undevelopable land, obscuring the potential of rural and brownfield areas for development.
Studies and planning frameworks, including Hong Kong 2030+ and the Northern Metropolis strategy, identify hundreds of hectares of underutilised or vacant land, such as brownfield sites, government-owned plots and developers’ land banks, that could be redeployed for housing, showing the city has not simply run out of space.
A Better Plan
The real constraint is not geography but governance: zoning regimes, environmental designations, political resistance to redistribution and a land disposal system calibrated to maximise fiscal returns. Scarcity in Hong Kong is not a natural condition, it’s the cumulative outcome of policy choices about what land may be used, when and for whom.
As Hong Kong continues to navigate the afterlife of colonial land policies, alongside an increasingly centralised relationship with the Mainland, the city finds itself caught in a narrowing physical and political space. The sense of claustrophobia that now shadows this global financial hub is not merely symbolic, it is built into the urban fabric itself.
A planning regime that engineered scarcity has left the city denser, more fragile and less adaptable. Fires, unsafe housing and overstretched neighbourhoods are not aberrations, but stress signals from a system designed to constrain supply rather than accommodate lives.
If Hong Kong’s future is to be defined by more than managed compression, it will require confronting the uncomfortable reality that its land crisis is not a matter of fate, but of choices, choices that can still be revised.
Photos credit: Alex Low
