Who paid for the view

1From the Hang Seng rooftop you can see the harbour as a postcard. From a subdivided flat in Sham Shui Po you can see the neighbour’s washing and a slice of sky the width of a ruler. Both are Hong Kong. Only one appears in tourism videos.

2Housing arguments in this city often collapse into slogans: build more, tax the rich, wait for the market. Each slogan contains a piece of a fact and pretends to be the whole fact. Land is scarce, yes. Decisions about what to put on that land are not made by geology. They are made in rooms with good air-conditioning.

3A friend who works in sales likes to say that young people should “just save harder”. He is not cruel. He is repeating a story that once fitted his parents, who bought a walk-up in the 1980s on one civil-service salary. Repeating it now is like offering someone a map of a road that has since been gated.

4Public housing queues stretch into a future that current applicants will spend as adults, not children. Private rents take a share of income that would, in another city, be called a crisis and given a shorter name. Meanwhile, empty flats are discussed as if they were a weather event, not a choice.

5None of this means every owner is a villain. A couple who waited fifteen years for a small Home Ownership flat are not the same as a company sitting on a dark floor of units. Policy that cannot tell the two apart will punish the wrong people and leave the dark floor dark.

6A serious conversation would start with numbers that fit on one page: waiting time, vacancy, the share of income spent on rent, who decides zoning. It would end not with a slogan but with a list of buildings and dates. Until then, the postcard harbour will keep being sold, and the ruler-width of sky will keep being lived in.