Hong Kong Golf Club is located in Fanling, a town just four kilometres from the city’s border with China. The 18-hole course was opened in 1911, on 172 hectares leased from the government. Since 1959 it has been home to the Hong Kong Open, one of Asia’s premier golfing events.PHILIP FONG/AFP/Getty Images
In a matter of a few years, the Hong Kong government has crushed the city’s protest movement, jailed pro-democracy politicians and muzzled a once combative and freewheeling press. When challenged, officials said they were building a new system that would be more efficient, capable of solving the Chinese territory’s many problems, chief among them the stratospheric cost of housing.
At first, this seemed to be true. Officials announced ambitious plans, and without opposition lawmakers filibustering or rallying public criticism, bills sailed through the legislature. Demonstrations, once a regular occurrence, have become rare and toothless.
Then the government took on the golfers.
A fight over 32 hectares of land at the Hong Kong Golf Club has split the city’s pro-Beijing establishment, seen the government challenged in the courts and media and put officials in the awkward position of aggressively advocating for a plan that everyone agrees will do little to address the wider housing issue.
Simon Yau, a professor of urban studies at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, said the city’s Chief Executive, John Lee, is “riding a tiger.”
“He never expected the elite could mobilize so much lobbying effort,” Prof. Yau said. “It shows that even though the political climate has changed, policy implementation is not without obstacles and the elite do not always co-operate.”
By all measures, housing in Hong Kong is among the most expensive in the world. The average cost of a home is almost 19 times the median household income, according to research by the Urban Reform Institute, a U.S. think tank. Even after a 15-per-cent price drop, the result of a lacklustre economy and population exodus in recent years, the median price of an apartment was US$1.16-million in the first half of this year, the second-highest in Asia, behind only Singapore, according to the Urban Land Institute, an international NGO.
Unlike Singapore, however, where two-thirds of the population live in public housing, just 30 per cent of Hong Kongers do. The average rent for a private apartment is US$1,600, or half the median monthly salary. Many poorer residents live in tiny, subdivided flats – less than 75 square feet – and pay upward of US$500 a month.
Despite consecutive governments promising to tackle the issue, housing and rental costs have been on a near-constant rise for decades, while public housing remains in short supply. In 1998, the average wait for a public housing unit was 6.5 years; today it is 5.3, with an estimated 130,000 households on the list.
Many officials pointed to the housing crisis as a major driver of the civil unrest in 2019 and earlier. During a visit to the city last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping said “the biggest aspiration of Hong Kong people is to lead a better life, in which they will have more decent housing.”
Hong Kong Golf Club is located in Fanling, a town just four kilometres from the city’s border with China. The 18-hole course was opened in 1911, on 172 hectares leased from the government. Since 1959 it has been home to the Hong Kong Open, one of Asia’s premier golfing events.
On a map, the Fanling course is a big chunk of empty greenspace surrounded by urban sprawl. In 2018, a government task force recommended developing 32 hectares – about a fifth of the site – for housing. According to officials, more than 60 per cent of Hong Kongers supported such a plan.
The city’s business elite quickly lined up against the proposal, as did prominent officials – almost half of Mr. Lee’s executive council are golf club members. Shrinking the course could harm Hong Kong’s public image and compromise a prime venue for making business deals, they said, pointing out that Singapore – half the size of Hong Kong – has 14 major golf courses, compared with the Chinese territory’s eight.
Public housing advocacy groups and trade unions backed the plan, but as the September deadline for handing over the land nears, the golf club has rallied a surprisingly broad coalition, from bankers to conservationists, to make its case, with more than 6,000 submissions to the planning board considering the proposal.
“The golf course is exceptionally important in terms of Hong Kong’s ecology and landscape quality,” said Chi Yung Jim, the research chair of geography and environmental science at the Education University of Hong Kong.
Prof. Jim, who is not a member of the club, said he didn’t care if the site remained a golf course, as long as its natural diversity was protected. In a presentation to the planning board, he said the Fanling site is home to several endangered tree species and acted as a “green corridor” for animal species, as well as a heat sink for the surrounding urban areas.
His was one of 17 submissions put forward by the golf club, covering everything from the course’s cultural heritage to the ecology of moths and potential importance to the Northern Metropolis, a far more ambitious government plan to develop the border area between Hong Kong and China.
These did not convince the planning board, however, or Hong Kong’s environment bureau, which signed off on the housing plan in July, clearing the way for development to begin. The club has filed for a judicial review of that decision, saying it was flawed. It has also sought UNESCO conservation status for the course, which could further complicate matters.
Meanwhile, Mr. Lee’s government said it had identified sufficient land to build some 360,000 public housing units in the next 10 years, 59,000 more than the city will require.
That would seem to preclude any need for developing the golf club land, but the government has shown no signs of backing down. Nor has the club, with litigation likely to drag on for years, forestalling any homes being built on the land even after it is set aside for development next month.
Or, as government adviser Regina Ip, herself a golf club member, put it, “if the government insists on destroying the course, they will only cause damage, while accomplishing nothing.”
With reports from Reuters