The relationship between living density and fertility intention in Hong Kong

Abstract

Similar to other advanced cities, Hong Kong has been undergone a demographic transition where both the birth rates and death rates have declined rapidly. The total fertility rate has dropped to an unprecedentedly low at 0.8 which is the lowest among other cities in the world. Meanwhile, the residential housing in Hong Kong has been going further unaffordable over the past two decades and it has been ranked as the most unaffordable market in the world for 14th consecutive years. As a result, the residential housing flats have been built smaller and smaller to allow financially accessible to more potential buyers. The so-called “nano flats”, which refers to the tiny flats with size less than 20m2, emerged and became popular in the last decade. Many people have blamed on the insufficient living spaces as one of the major reasons of the declining fertility rates in Hong Kong. Yet, there is no study examining the relationship between living density and fertility intention in Hong Kong. To fill in this research gap, this study tried to explore the relationship between living density and fertility intention in Hong Kong by adopting ordinal logistic regression model. Through distribution of questionnaire physically on the streets and online forums, a total 1,010 valid questionnaire were collected. IBM SPSS statistics version 29 was applied to analyze the data and the findings suggested that there is a negative relationship between living density and fertility intention in Hong Kong with coefficient at .023 and p value < 0.05. In this connection, the Government of the HKSAR is recommended to enlarge the house size of all the private housing, subsidized sale flats and public rental housing flats such as setting further regulations, amending the guidance for building subsidized sale flats developments and extending the scope of “home space enhancement” to avoid the dire social and economic consequences stemmed from ageing population.