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Housing
Housing Policy
The government provides PRH, mainly through the Hong Kong Housing Authority2, to low- income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation. It aims to provide the first flat offer to general applicants (i.e. family and elderly one-person applicants) at around three years on average in the long run.
The Housing Authority has a rolling construction programme to achieve the public housing supply target. About 75,600 PRH flats and 17,800 subsidised sale flats3 will be built over the five years from 2015-16.
It is the government's policy to maintain the healthy and stable development of the residential property market. As at end-December, the estimated supply of first-hand private flats for the next three to four years was about 87,000 units.
Institutional Framework
The Secretary for Transport and Housing oversees housing matters, assisted by the Director of Housing, and is also the Housing Authority's chairman.
The department has both policy and operational responsibilities for providing PRH. It offers secretariat and executive support to the Housing Authority and its committees. The Transport and Housing Bureau's housing arm monitors the private market, ensures home buyers have access to accurate, comprehensive and transparent transaction information and oversees policy matters involving the regulation of estate agents.
Public Rental Housing
In the fourth quarter of 2015, about 2.15 million people, or 30 per cent of the population, live in public rental flats of the Housing Authority and Hong Kong Housing Society. There were also about 147,000 PRH general applicants and 143,700 non-elderly one-person applicants under the Quota and Points System (QPS). The average waiting times for general applicants was 3.7 years.
The Housing Authority's revised estimated housing expenditure in 2014-15 was $23.7 billion, or about 5.4 per cent of public expenditure.
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The Housing Authority is a statutory body that implements most of the city's public housing programmes. It provides PRH to low-income families which cannot afford private rental accommodation and subsidised sale flats to low- to middle-income families. It also runs interim housing and transit centres to provide temporary accommodation to families facing short-term problems in finding suitable accommodation.
Subsidised sale flats are mainly Home Ownership Scheme (HOS) flats.
The Housing Society is an independent, not-for-profit organisation. One of its major functions is to provide subsidised housing to target groups at affordable rents.
Waiting time refers to the time taken between registration for PRH and the first flat offer, excluding any frozen period during the application period (such as when the applicant has not yet fulfilled the residence requirement or has requested to put the application on hold pending the arrival of family members for a family reunion). The average waiting time for general applicants refers to the average of the waiting times of those general applicants who were housed to PRH in the past 12 months.
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