Hong Kong should revive plans for large-scale reclamation off Lantau Island to run in parallel with the Northern Metropolis project, property magnate Gordon Wu Ying-sheung has said, warning that a lack of urban land will hold back the city’s development as the population grows.
The 90-year-old founder and chairman of Hopewell Holdings also described it as “too early to say” whether his property empire would follow its peers and commit to investing in the mega development near the city’s border with mainland China.
“We don’t know, because at the present moment the land is still not owned by the government. So that’s the first priority [for us],” he told the South China Morning Post. “Get the ownership, get the transport – all that is the government’s [job]. After that, the private sector will come in.”
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Wu said Hong Kong’s development had been constrained by a lack of land, which had led to the housing affordability crisis. He noted that out of Hong Kong’s roughly 1,000 sq km of land, housing a population of 7.5 million, only about 25 per cent had been developed for residential and urban use.
While Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu’s administration has focused heavily on the 30,000-hectare Northern Metropolis project as the key driver of Hong Kong’s growth, Wu argued that large-scale reclamation in waters off Lantau – which he advocated for decades – should be revived.
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“The priority is the Northern Metropolis, but you still have to be prepared … Hong Kong’s [population] may grow to about 10 million people. How can you handle it? You’ve got to think ahead, find the land on top of the Northern Metropolis,” Wu said.