Page 25 - LH_Research_Report_2020_Eng

In the past five years (2015–2019), the Government mainly relied on land rezoning, in which sites with other uses are amended
and transformed into residential sites, in order to provide for residential land supply. It is observed that 30% of the private housing
completions during the same period were from rezoned land.

However, land rezoning does not create any new land. As more sites were rezoned for residential use, increasing land supply has
to pivot on other approaches. In 2020–2024, it is expected to see the highest completion contribution (25%) comes from railway
property development projects awarded by the MTR Corporation and the West Rail.
Looking ahead to 2025 to 2029, our land source will become severely inadequate with limited land source options. Redevelopment
has been slow in nature and may not be expected to provide a bulk of housing all out of a sudden. Besides, railway landbank
will become scarce in the next decade (see Figure 12). Also, most reclamation proposals are also experiencing hinderance.
The ideal solution will be to develop New Development Areas (NDA) / new towns in order to create a large piece of land with
coordinated planning. However, in the 2020–21 Budget Speech, delays are observed in the development of NDAs / new towns.
For instance, compared to last year, the wording describing the timeline of Kwu Tung North/ Fanling North NDA has been
changed from ‘the first batch of public housing to be completed in 2026’ to ‘with a view to enabling the first population intake of
the public housing development in 2027’. Moreover, the announced timeline of Yuen Long South NDA was also changed from
‘the first population intake is targeted in 2026’ to ‘we will strive to have the first batch of public housing units in place in 2028’.

Therefore, we may be left with no choice but to resort to rezoning again. However, as the Government rezoned
sites aggressively in the past few years, the low hanging fruits should have already been processed. In fact,
the Government’s rezoning progress has slowed down significantly in 2019 (see Table 3). Rezoning by private
developers are often held back by administrative red tape as well. (See Figure 13 and Figure 14)

In addition, without a comprehensive planning and a major upgrade of supportive infrastructure, these individual rezoning sites
are unlikely to be able to support high density housing development. This is evidenced by the fact that the first batch of shortlisted
brownfield clusters suitable for public housing development, which is estimated to be about 63 hectares when combining with
adjacent lands, according to the latest LegCo document, could only provide some 20,000 units.

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