Imagine working a 10-hour shift only to come home to a space the same size as your cubicle at work. While this may be hard to imagine for some, this is common in Hong Kong due to the exponentially increasing population and the limited space. To create a coffin home, flats were illegally subdivided into around 15 partitioned units, sharing a kitchen and bathroom. Each home is usually only large enough for a bunk bed which is surrounded by a metal cage. Not only does this bed have to hold one’s basic necessities, it also has to function as sleeping quarters. Therefore, for many, these coffin homes only allow for the uncomfortable position of bending their legs in an almost fetal-like position while lying down.
If the size of these coffin homes is so small, naturally one would assume that so would the rent. However, this is not the case. The rent for this mere 2 ft by 6 ft home can be as expensive as $2,500 HKD ($318 USD) per month. The fact that 200,000 Hong Kong-ers are living in such inhumane conditions probes investigation into why they exist and what can be done to help these people.
The History
Coffin Homes date back to the late 1950s when there was an unexpected population surge from 600,000 to 2.1 million people within 5 years due to increased refugees as a result of the Chinese Civil War. With the population increasing so quickly, there wasn’t space to house all these people. Therefore, the first cage homes were built, made from metal bunk beds encased in thin wire to accommodate these new immigrants.
What started as a makeshift home for these immigrants, became a permanent problem within Hong Kong’s housing. Since then, the government has built 780,679 units of public housing provided in 40-story buildings, as an attempt to provide more affordable, subsidized housing for the less fortunate. This public housing, heavily subsidized by the government, only costs around $2,500 per month, the same costs as these coffin homes! So, why isn’t this problem eradicated? Despite pledges made to allocate public housing to applicants in no more than 3 years, these 200,000 people living in coffin homes still wait for an average of nearly 6 years for public housing. Some say that they applied for public housing 2 years ago and have never heard a response from the government.
In 2018, the government came up with a new initiative: transitional homes, to allow for a smoother transition for those waiting for public housing. The rent is $3,000 HKD ($382 USD) per month for a 290 sq ft container-like module, not subsidized as heavily by the government. While the government aims to finish building 16,000 of these transitional units by mid-2023, there are still only about 2,000 transitional homes built as of 2021. As this is such a recent development, we don’t yet know how temporary transitional homes will be. Yet, with rising costs of living and the long wait for public housing, there still needs to be a more permanent fix for those living in these coffin homes.
The Housing Crisis
Among the top 4 most densely populated countries in the world, Hong Kong has an impossible demand: to fit 7.5 million people on its small 1,114 km² lands. As it turns out, building public housing after public housing just isn’t enough to meet the demands of such a large population for its size with 50% of Hong Kong residents already living in public housing. With reference to the government’s 2020 survey, only a small 79 of the 1,114 km² of land– a meager 7% of Hong Kong is allocated for its residency, kept unchanged for the past 16+ years. This raises the question- what is the rest of the land used for? Hong Kong reserves its land for country parks, wetlands, marine parks, reservoirs, water gathering grounds etcetera at the cost of the standards of living of the Hong Kong population. The government’s unwillingness to sacrifice this land for housing and the lack of large-scale development plans, it leaves Hong Kong with a huge shortage of housing, reflected in its constantly rising housing prices.
The predicament of Hong Kong’s housing is hard to solve. There is currently no permanent or viable solution for those living in coffin homes. However, each of us can take a step toward better understanding their perspective and make them feel seen, understood, and supported in our community. For instance, donation drives for food, clothing, and books, taking some financial burden off their shoulders, or being the voice for these people through social movements. Fortunately, Hong Kong’s housing still has a promising future ahead with a new chief executive, John Lee, whose main focus is to sell more land to increase the number of homes that can be built as a more effective alternative.
— Writer Naphat (Belle) can be reached at naphatchanpongsang@gmail.com. Follow her on Instagram @_naphat.c_.
