To evaluate the effectiveness of Tenant Purchase Scheme (TPS)

Abstract

Tenant Purchase Scheme (TPS) is one of scheme that the Hong Kong Housing Authority responses to low-income families’ need for buying their owner-occupied flat. There are policy, social, economic and political objectives that TPS aims to achieve. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of TPS by evaluating its objective, and find the satisfactory level from user’s perspective by conducting on street opinion survey in three estates namely Lei Tung Estate, Chuk Yuen North Estate and Kin Sang Estate. TPS has objectives such as incremental of home ownership rate (policy objective), provide affordable housing to low-income families (social objective), achieve efficiency in allocation of public housing (economic objective) and achieve accountability to the public (political objective). However, the objectives are not very well achieved by this scheme. Also, from the tenure choice resulted in an on-street opinion survey, more than half of interviewees indicated they would not buy TPS flat. From user’s perspective, although there are several reasons that may affect their purchase behaviour, it attributes that TPS is not so successful at the time of implementation as it cannot achieve its’ objectives nor attract potential buyers to buy TPS flat. At the end, recommendations for improving the effectiveness of TPS would be suggested. Examples such as provide affordable housing to PRH tenant by adjusting its selling price and mortgage repayment, improving the living quality of TPS estates, provide incentives to potential buyers to buy the flat and facilitate two-way communication so that the official could understand potential buyer’s concern and willingness to buy subsidized housing in the next housing scheme were suggested.