Hong Kong is known as a leading international business and financial centre. Yet behind the dazzling neon lights and the skyscraper-studded skyline lie 226,000 people who are struggling to even find adequate space to live. This article provides an introduction to subdivided housing in Hong Kong.
What are subdivided flats?
Subdivided flats refer to when landlords carve up a flat – usually in older buildings – into as many as seven or eight units, renting each out individually. The median monthly rent for a subdivided unit is $4800, even though roughly half of all subdivided flats are only approximately 123 square feet in size.
What’s it like in a subdivided flat?
Subdivided flats have poor hygiene conditions – people living in these flats may have to share the toilet or kitchen with other tenants, and these poor conditions may cause infestations of cockroaches or rats. Most property owners also do not bother with maintenance, so many tenants may have to put up with inconveniences like water seepages or regular power cuts.
Subdivided flats also have poor lighting and ventilation. Nearly 20% of tenants either do not have or cannot use windows. In addition, 47.6% of subdivided flats have temperature readings above 30℃ (the optimum room temperature for humans is 24℃), and this temperature rises during the summer, making the flat increasingly stuffy and uncomfortable to live in.
If the conditions are so bad, why can’t people just move out?
Hong Kong is home to the world’s most expensive property market, according to real-estate consultancy CBRE. It is also notoriously hard to get a flat in one of Hong Kong’s many public housing estates – the average wait time for general applicants is 5.6 years. Thus, this has fuelled demand for subdivided flats. Although subdivided flats have much worse living conditions, and the average monthly rent per square foot for subdivided flats are significantly higher than for private housing, tenants have no choice. What else are they supposed to do when they cannot afford private housing, and cannot find a flat in a public housing estate?
Wait, but what about the pandemic?
How does one isolate themself when their entire family lives in one room? During the 5th wave of the pandemic, one construction worker and his wife decided to camp on the rooftop of their building for more than 2 weeks when they caught Covid-19, in order not to infect the 6 other family members that lived in their subdivided flat. They had to endure the cold weather and the bad hygiene conditions – all while they were infected with Covid-19. The pandemic has made living conditions even worse for residents of subdivided flats.
According to a survey carried out among residents of subdivided flats by Caritas’ Youth and Community Service division and Health in Action, 52.3% of respondents said they suffered from a fall in income as Hong Kong’s economy declined during the 5th wave of the pandemic. Despite this, 12.2% of respondents faced an average rental raise of nearly 8%. The rent for subdivided flats, which were already high in the first place, increased even more during the pandemic – a time when residents were receiving less income. Thus, the pandemic only increased residents’ financial burden.
It’s impossible to cover everything related to subdivided flats in one article, but hopefully, this article has provided you with more basic information about this complex social issue. If you want to learn more, it never hurts to do more research on this topic!
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