Public housing rent still affordable even if increased by 10pc: Rosanna Law

The monthly rent will still be affordable for tenants of public rental housing even if it goes up by as much as 10 percent, resulting in a HK$200 increase at most, Director for Housing Rosanna Law Shuk-pui said. 

In a TV interview on Saturday, Law pointed out that the rent is about HK$2,200 on average. The rent is below HK$2,000 for some 40 percent of tenants in the city while some only have to pay hundreds of Hong Kong dollars of rent, she added. 

Even if the Housing Authority is to increase the rent by 10 percent, the actual rent hike will only range from HK$100 to HK$200 and maybe even less, she noted. 

She made the remark as the Housing Authority will conduct the biannually rent review for public rental housing in mid-2024. 

Law noted that it is true that rent can go up or down according to existing mechanisms, but stressed the public’s outlook on the underperforming economy only involves the capital and stock markets. Tenants of public rental housing may not be impacted much. 

She also said since authorities launched a project to combat abuse of public homes last October, almost all 88,000 households have declared their incomes and assets. 

The Authority has recovered some 400 units already and only some 120 households have yet to return their declaration forms. 

Among the forms returned, some 55,000 forms were further forwarded to the Land Registry and over 100 were found to have owned properties in the city, of which only a tiny number had declared to the government. 

Some 30 units have been recovered and the Authority will continue to recover the rest of those units, Law said. 

Law is also confident that the government can achieve the goal of shortening the waiting time for public rental housing to 4.5 years by 2026/27. 

Still, she expects the waiting time to fluctuate in the short term, citing the comparatively lower number of flats completed in the first five years of the 10-year housing supply target.