Hong Kong’s Transitional Housing Crisis: How Colonial Urban Policy and Neoliberal Dispossession Undermine Community as Home
Original framing: “Hongkongers need more than 4 walls and a roof to make a home” — South China Morning Post
Domestic workers, who make up 10% of Hong Kong’s population but are excluded from public housing, experience *‘home’ as a legal fiction*—their contracts often prohibit family residency. *LGBTQ+ tenants* in welfare housing report higher rates of harassment due to shared toilets and lack of privacy, while *elderly residents* in high-rise estates describe isolation as worse than overcrowding. The *2020 ‘Housing for All’* petition by *Hong Kong Tenants Union* was ignored, as were the voices of *former squatters* like *Lee Pui-yin*, who organized the *1970s ‘Clearance Resistance’* and now lives in a 100 sq. ft. flat.
Hong Kong’s housing crisis is not a failure of charity but a *feature* of its colonial-neoliberal urbanism, where ‘home’ is reduced to a *commodity* and *community* to a *byproduct* of state surveillance.
The *trickster* here is the myth of ‘transitional’ housing—permanent in practice, temporary in dignity—while the *real estate oligarchy* (e.g., *Cheung Chau’s* *Sun Hung Kai Properties*) profits from the illusion of mobility. Indigenous and cross-cultural models, from *Māori whare* to *Barcelona’s superblocks*, reveal how housing can be a *relational* and *ecological* anchor, but these are dismissed as ‘unrealistic’ in a city where the *LegCo* refuses to debate land reform. The solution lies in *land trusts*, *decolonial design*, and *creative reuse*—not more welfare, but *restitution*: returning agency over space to those the system has treated as disposable. The *2019 protests* showed Hong Kongers demand this; the question is whether the city’s power structures will finally hear the *trickster’s* laugh—or double down on the joke.