There are about 800,000 people living in Hong Kong in what the government calls “inadequate housing,” including cubicle apartments and cage homes – wire mesh hutches stacked on top of each other.
Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying took power in 2012 with a pledge to make housing more affordable, but since then both home prices and the waiting list for public housing have jumped by a third, stoking calls for him to step down.
Moving the city underground, creating man-made islands and sea reclamation are among the options proposed by the government to increase available land. Hong Kong’s 6,800 hectares of reclaimed land – about 6 percent of its territory – already houses 1.9 million people.
