Dreams of a shared future

Hong Kong's pilot community living room program to improve life for the less privileged has drawn a positive response from residents. The project aims to reduce the city's chronic housing problem and eventually end the quagmire of subdivided flats. Fang Xue reports in Hong Kong.

When Huang Kaifeng, 13, and his 10-year-old brother, Kaixuan, stepped into their new home in Hong Kong - a flat of less than 100 square feet (9.29 square meters) on Tai Nan Street, Sham Shui Po District - they were disappointed. They feared their hope of continuing to immerse themselves in the piano's musical strings might have gone for good.

The brothers and their mother, Zhang Ling, arrived in the special administrative region on a freezing day in January to join Zhang's husband living in one of the city's notorious subdivided flats. The family hails from the Chinese mainland's southwestern province of Yunnan, where Kaifeng and Kaixuan used to engage in their favorite pastime - enjoying free piano lessons from their uncle. However, when they moved, they had to pack everything into a corner because of a lack of space.

Their new cramped home and the family's meager monthly income of HK$7,000 ($897) - about a quarter of the SAR's median household income per month - left them struggling to survive until Kaifeng saw a flyer about the city's Community Living Room program aimed at improving the quality of life of grassroots families. The pilot project, initiated by the SAR government, was launched in Sham Shui Po in December.

Proposed by Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu in his 2023 Policy Address, the program is aimed at providing the community a public facility with shared dining rooms, kitchens, and laundry facilities to alleviate the hardships they face in daily life, also as part of measures to solve Hong Kong's chronic housing problem. According to a government report in 2021, the average floor area per tenant in a subdivided unit was just 65 sq ft - smaller than an individual cell at Stanley Prison. Only 66 percent of these units have their own kitchens. The report said more than 210,000 people, or 2.8 percent of the city's population, were living in these flats at the time, and the number of such units had grown by 17 percent between 2016 and 2021 - from 92,700 to 108,200.

A survey conducted in 2016 showed that nearly 52 percent of the tenants chose subdivided flats because of the low rents, while 17.4 percent said they wanted to save money. Their average monthly household income was HK$15,310 in 2021, well behind the average of HK$27,650 per family. The median monthly rent for a subdivided unit was about HK$5,000 in 2021, significantly lower than the median monthly rent of HK$12,000 for private flats. The crowded shared flats are seen as transitional living spaces, with more than 48 percent of the tenants still on the waiting list for public housing. The average waiting time for a public housing apartment was 5.7 years as of March.