Evaluate the effectiveness of subsidized home ownership policies : the comparison of Home ownership scheme and Green form subsidized home ownership scheme

Abstract

Housing problem has always been the focus of public and bothering Hong Kong in many years. Throughout the decades the Government introduced various kind of intervention to the housing market no matter in the supply and demand side. After introducing the public rental housing, to satisfy the demand of public ownership the government introduced the first generation of subsidized sales flat through HOS. For a certain period, HOS was being the only subsidized sales flat provided by the government and it was ceased due to the economic down turn of Hong Kong after the impact of SARS. With the restoration of economy and the growth in property price, the housing problem has been raised again in the society and the demand from public eventually brought back the HOS program in 2014. Apart from the demand of home ownership, the waiting time of PRH had broken the record. As a result, the government proposed the GSH program to encourage PRH tenants to buy their flats and vacating their PRH units to relieve the long waiting time of PRH. Up to this moment, in Hong Kong there were two subsidized sales flat program provided by the government. Although increasing the provision of subsidized sales flat should be able to relieve the housing problem brought by the high rise in property price, the existence of two subsidized sales flat program were being criticized. As both of the program are provided by the government, they have many similarities to each other including pricing mechanism, design, target customers etc. under this background some people criticized that the programs were duplicating to each other and leading to a competition on public residential land resources. In this paper, the background and mechanism of HOS and GSH will be studied, to understand the reason of establishment of two subsidized sales flat program. Then it attempts to evaluate the owners from both programs to understand their needs and benefits though the purchase of the subsidized flat. And eventually analyze the effectiveness of HOS and GSH to see the necessity of the existence of two subsidized sales flat program how can they benefits their target customer.