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As the aerial photos demonstrate, the site in question
accommodated a mixture of houses and warehouses in 1999, which are
currently public housing estates under construction.
Figure 24. Photos of Tsz Tin Tsuen in 1999 and 2016

Sources: Lands Department, and Google. 3

Two points should be reiterated and clarified at this juncture. First,
we value procedural justice and support civic participation in the town
planning process. Hence we are not advocating for a diminished level of
community engagement in such processes as changes of land use.

Second, given the chronic shortage of land, we fully support the
notion that the utilisation efficiency of land resources must be improved,
and hence a comprehensive review of the existing use of brownfield sites.
However, we are not in favour of a policy prioritising any particular source
of land supply. This is because any method to increase land supply will ulti-
mately be faced with an assortment of challenges and difficulties.

Take brownfield sites as an example, such large-scale, systematic de-
velopment will naturally involve an abundance of land resumption and reset-
tlement procedures. This is time-consuming, and thus it is exceedingly difficult
to prioritise any method for the supply of land. In fact, several NDAs proposed
by the government cover sizeable areas of brownfield sites (Table 5).

Table 5. The size and share of brownfield of three NDAs
Development Brownfield
NDA scale involved Share of brownfield
(Hectares) (Hectares) in the NDA
Yuen Long South 223 100 45%
Hong Shui Kiu 714 190 27%
Kwu Tung North/ Fanling North 614 50 8%
Source: Legislative Council.

To provide a fuller context, it should be noted that the site for the rede-
velopment of Kwai Chung Former Police Quarter measured about 1 hectare,
whereas the development of Tsz Tin Tsuen involved some 4 hectares of land.
The discussion furnished above has demonstrated that even the develop-
ment of sites with such limited scale could be extremely lengthy. It follows
that in the few NDAs currently under planning, which occupy up to a few hun-
dred hectares each, would involve such processes as land resumption, reset-
tlement, compensation of plots of land that are even larger, and hence, more

92 3. The aerial photo reproduced with permission of the Director of Lands.
©The Government of the Hong Kong SAR. Licence No. 80/2016.