Exploring the association between housing inequalities among young singletons and social stability in Hong Kong

Abstract

Due to the different housing issues, housing affordability has becoming a much severe problem in Hong Kong and had resulted in different housing problems such as the increased waiting time for public housing and the worsening conditions of the sub-divided units. Comparing with the housing market 20 years ago, the possibility to achieve homeownership is relatively low in the recent Hong Kong. For the public housing market, priorities were given to families and elderly. As for the private housing market, 20 years of annual income of an average household is required for purchasing a flat. Accordingly, it is challenging for young singletons without adequate financial support to achieve homeownership in Hong Kong. As to stabilize the house prices, the government has been producing public housing supply massively to shelter the low-income groups; and introducing different stamp duties to increase the total cost of purchasing housing in the private market. Nevertheless, the government fails to control the housing market as the house price to income ratio was being doubled in a decade, and Hong Kong has been ranking as the least affordable housing market for 10 years consecutively. The housing affordability could not be enhanced and Hong Kong has become the most expensive housing market in the world. While young singletons aspire for having their own housing, not being able to fulfill such desire had developed unhappiness and disappointment towards the government as they expect the government to intervene the housing market for stabilizing the skyrocketing housing price. Such negative emotion may then even evolve into anger or violence and further pose threats to the city’s social stability. Social instability is often caused by different types of inequalities. Since June 2019, there were a series of protests against the enaction of the extradition law bill and different scholars had pointed out that the housing problems among the young generations were the underlying factors to the social unrests. This study discusses the housing inequalities that young singletons are facing and its effect on social stability. The results from this study finds out that there is an association in between these two concepts. When comparing with young singletons in other generations, young individuals that are less well-off are definitely facing more challenges on accessing housing than ever. These difficulties that hinder them from being homeowners had somewhat created resentment towards the government. Housing inequalities might not be the main reason that led to the series of social unrests but unquestionably it had created negative sentiment among the society. It is therefore believed that social stability could be enhanced by formulating housing policies or schemes targeting this group of stakeholder as to reduce housing inequalities.