HONG KONG (NYTIMES) - Rents higher than New York, London or San Francisco for apartments half the size. Nearly 1 in 5 people living in poverty. A minimum wage of US$4.82 (S$6.56) an hour.. Read more at straitstimes.com.
HONG KONG - Rents higher than New York, London or San Francisco for apartments half the size. Nearly 1 in 5 people living in poverty. A minimum wage of US$4.82 an hour.
Mr Leung joined the protests over Hong Kong's plan to allow extraditions of criminal suspects to mainland China, where the Communist Party controls the courts and forced confessions are common. Wages have not kept up with rent, which has increased by nearly a quarter over the same period. Housing prices have more than tripled over the past decade. The median price of a house is more than 20 times the annual median household income.
The long term solution, pro-Beijing officials say, is greater integration with the mainland, not less. Young people could take advantage of a programme in which the Hong Kong government helps entrepreneurs to set up a business in the Greater Bay Area, a new economic zone that links Hong Kong with the mainland, said Mr Felix Chung, who leads the pro-Beijing Liberal Party in the Legislative Council, the city's lawmaking body.
Housing lies at the root of many of the frustrations. So many people are priced out of the housing market that it is unusual to meet a young adult who does not still live with parents or family members. They cite the time last year when activists asked city officials to consider turning a golf course into public housing. The 54-hole course, the anchor for a 2,600-member golf club nestled amid Hong Kong's landscape of concrete dominoes, could have housed apartments for 37,000 people. In the end the government chose to set aside less than one-fifth of the land.
"Many young people see there is little way out economically and politically, and it is the background of their desperation and anger at the status quo," said Mr Ho-fung Hung, a political-economy professor at Johns Hopkins University.Currently, more than 250,000 people are waiting for access to public housing. The number could be even higher, but Hong Kong officials have kept the cutoff at income of less than US$12,000 per year.
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