Hong Kong authorities are planning to conduct spot checks on public housing applicants to ensure they do not own mainland Chinese properties, according to the city’s housing director, who also warned young people against eyeing rental homes to “lie flat”.
Housing director Rosanna Law Shuk-pui revealed the measure on Friday, part of the government’s ongoing drive to crack down on well-off residents who abused the system.
Law said the administration would communicate with its mainland counterparts to figure out easier ways for the local government to access the property information of public rental housing tenants.
Under the current system, authorities in Hong Kong must file requests with individual departments on the mainland to check whether residents held any assets across the border.
The government stepped up regulations targeting well-off public housing tenants last October after Kwong Kau, 66, the former father-in-law of slain model Abby Choi Tin-fung, was found to have owned a luxury home while buying a subsidised flat.
Under the revised rules, all tenants now have to make income and asset declarations every two years. Previously, only those having lived there for a decade had to do so.
Law said the government had repossessed about 700 public rental flats between April and June this year from tenants who failed to properly declare their property ownership.
About 2,200 and 2,800 public rental flats were repossessed in the past two financial years respectively, she said.
Macau and mainland authorities also recently confirmed that nine Hong Kong public housing tenants had owned residential or commercial premises in the gambling hub or across the border, Law said.
Some of the rental homes from the nine tenants had already been repossessed by the Hong Kong government, she added.
“We will continue the investigation and reallocate the public housing to the needy,” she told a Housing Authority meeting.
Anthony Chiu Kwok-wai, a member of the authority and executive director of the Federation of Public Housing Estates, commended government efforts to combat public housing abuse and said that the number of repossessions should gradually decrease following large-scale spot checks.
Law also called on young people not to rely on public housing, or even compromise their career aspirations to meet the income limit for applying for rental homes.
“We encourage the upward social mobility of young people instead of ‘lying flat’,” she said, citing a term used among young mainlanders to describe doing the bare minimum to get by.
Her calls echoed that of housing minister Winnie Ho Wing-yin, who warned that pursuing public housing at a young age would hinder or even distort one’s advancement in life.
