Home ownership reality and aspiration in Hong Kong (2008-2013)

Abstract

The aspiration of home ownership has widely spread across the society since HOS being launched in 1976 and a series of home ownership programmes launched in the subsequent years. Through appreciation of housing during economic booms, home owners experience substantial wealth accumulation. Trading up and down the property acquired, a new source of income generated. To stabilize the social and political situation, the government believes that home ownership is the most desirable tenure in Hong Kong. From 2008 to 2013, the housing price has been increasing significantly, leading to people have high aspiration on home ownership, especially for middle-income people. For low-income people, they are eligible for applying PRH. And for high-income people, they are financially available for acquiring the home ownership. So it is worth to investigate between the aspiration and reality on home ownership for middle-income and during the investigation, we can make recommendation to enhance the current home ownership policy.

In this research, the home ownership policy will be investigated over the past decades and subsequently literature review on the aspiration of people on home ownership as well as the reason and what is necessary for the government for implementing home ownership policy will be investigated. From the result of this research, it is found that middle-income aspire for affordable housing and in the meantime, they would like to acquire the home ownership for investment and accumulation of wealth. The preferences for the government’s support on achieving home ownership is various, which include building more HOS, resumption of home purchase loan, increase housing supply and release regulatory. However, the government finds the difficulties in implementing the said measures because of lacking of resources, such as land and housing. This research suggests that the government should review its town planning to make use of the available land for building more small-to-medium size of housing and to coordinate with developers by adopting the producer-subsidy approach to build more HOS. For resumption of in-cash subsidy, developers and banks can act as the loaner so as to share the risk of the government. However, the small to medium scale of this measure and the flexibility of termination of it should be adopted so as to avoid fuels to the housing market.