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One important standard was the size of the accommodation. The
initial standard was set with reference to the cramped conditions of the
old private tenements. Nonetheless, once the standard was laid down,
it became formally institutionalised and efforts to change the standard
became a politically divisive issue, subject to criticisms and reservations
across the board. Numerous protracted bureaucratic meetings were
required to achieve consensus, thus leading to prolonged indecision.

As a result, the standard of accommodation in the PRH sector
changed very slowly and lagged behind developments in the private
market. This gap between the private and public sectors has not narrowed
significantly since.

The government’s public housing policy is therefore the direct
reason why an unreasonably large proportion of housing units in Hong
Kong are too small. Any public housing programme is unavoidably
committed to building uniform-sized units for all. Yet when these units are
small, then a considerable number of them will be occupied by better-
off households who aspire to live in better and larger units, and the public
sector provision has fallen short of this aspirations for the past 60 years.

3.2 The Inequity of Our Housing Policy

Given the large difference in the median size of the housing units
between the private and public housing sectors, an efficient or optimal
housing arrangement would require that there be very different income
levels between the occupants of these sectors.

Table 6 presents figures on these income distributions in 1981 and
2011. All households are divided into four quartiles according to their monthly
income, from the top 25% to the bottom 25%. They are then assigned into
four categories according to their housing type: public tenants, private
tenants, public homeowners, and private homeowners to each of the four
quartiles and determine what percentages of their respective categories
are in each of these household income quartiles.

Table 6. Distribution of working-aged households (household heads aged 20 – 65) by housing
type and by income quartiles

Source: Census and Statistics Department.

The results are, quite simply, alarming. In theory, if those living in
pulbic housing are indeed the poorest in the society, their combined share

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