Letters and Blogs

Affordable housing not to be binned

The affordable housing scheme was designed to help urban low-income families, who are crowded out from the commercial housing market, to own living places of their own. The prices of affordable housing are capped by the government according to construction cost and consequently, are much lower than the commercial housing prices. Though it is a benign policy aiming to help the poor, fraud and scandals are rife in the distribution of them; and, a large chunk of affordable housing is usurped by the powerful social strata. Now some people are calling for its abolition.

Local authorities and real estate developers seem to be lukewarm to build more affordable housing. Land transfer fees, i.e. the money earned by the government through selling land to developers, account for a large share of the local authorities' revenue. Allocating land for affordable housing projects, however, brings much less revenue to the local authorities than the same land used for commercial development. The same logic applies to the real estate developers, too.