About Hong Kong Housing Society

Hong Kong Housing Society

The Hong Kong Housing Society is Hong Kong's second-largest public housing provider and its first independent statutory housing body. Founded on 17 April 1948 and formally incorporated in 1951 under the Hong Kong Housing Society Incorporation Ordinance (Cap. 1059), it is an independent, self-financing, non-profit organisation governed by its members. It has been described by Hong Kong's Chief Executive as the territory's housing laboratory, piloting housing schemes that government later adopted or adapted at scale. Since its inception it has built more than 73,000 homes under its various schemes, and it housed around 130,000 residents as of 2020. Its headquarters are in the World Trade Centre in Causeway Bay, and its official website is hkhs.com.

The Society's significance is out of proportion to its size relative to the Hong Kong Housing Authority, the largest provider. Again and again in Hong Kong housing history, a housing form appeared first in a Housing Society estate — the first rental estate, the first urban improvement redevelopment, flats for sale to sitting and middle-income households, housing designed for elderly residents — before becoming part of mainstream policy. Understanding the Society is therefore a way of understanding how Hong Kong's public housing system learned to do new things.

Founding in 1948: a London grant and Bishop Hall

The Society was born of the post-war housing crisis. After the Second World War, Hong Kong faced a devastating housing situation: large numbers of people were homeless and the population was growing rapidly with an influx of newcomers, many living in poor conditions. In 1947 the Lord Mayor of London donated a sum of GBP 14,000 from the Air Raid Distress Fund to the Hong Kong Social Welfare Council to help alleviate the problem.

A member of the Council, the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong, Ronald Hall, took the lead in using the donation to launch a housing organisation. Bishop Hall, together with a group of community and social leaders, established a committee that held its first meeting on 17 April 1948 — the date the Society counts as its founding. The Society was formally established in 1951 as a statutory body under Hong Kong Ordinance Chapter 1059, the Hong Kong Housing Society Incorporation Ordinance, making it the first-ever independent statutory body in Hong Kong to undertake public housing affairs. With a low-interest government loan of HK$2.5 million repayable over 40 years and land granted at a concessionary price, it was equipped to build.

Sheung Li Uk and the rental estates

In 1952 the Society completed Hong Kong's first rental housing estate, Sheung Li Uk in Sham Shui Po, providing five blocks with 360 residential units and accommodating about 1,900 tenants. Sheung Li Uk is a landmark in Hong Kong housing history: a planned, self-contained low-rental estate for low-income families, built by an independent society a year before the resettlement programme that followed the Shek Kip Mei fire reshaped government housing.

Rental housing remained the Society's foundation. Its own milestones record 20 rental estates providing around 32,000 units, and its rental programme has been continuously adapted — most visibly for an ageing tenant population. In 2013 the Society launched the Ageing-in-Place Scheme in its rental estates to address the housing, healthcare and social needs of elderly tenants together, an approach that treats an old estate not merely as buildings to be maintained but as a community whose residents' needs change over decades.

The housing laboratory: pioneering new schemes

The Society's reputation as Hong Kong's housing laboratory rests on a sequence of firsts. In 1974 it implemented the first project of the Urban Improvement Scheme in Kennedy Town, where old buildings were pulled down and redeveloped into Mei Sun Lau; more than 30 such projects followed, testing how older urban districts could be rebuilt piecemeal without wholesale clearance. Urban renewal and estate redevelopment have remained part of its work ever since.

In 1987 the Society started the Flat-for-Sale Scheme, with its first project, Clague Garden Estate, completed in 1989; a total of 10 projects were developed under the scheme with over 10,000 flats. The Flat-for-Sale Scheme tested subsidised home ownership for households that could not afford private prices — a policy direction of lasting importance in Hong Kong. In the same pioneering pattern the Society later ran the Flat-for-Flat Pilot Scheme for Elderly Owners, launched in 2019, to facilitate the circulation of subsidised sale flats and maximise the use of public housing resources while offering elderly owners an alternative suited to their stage of life.

The Sandwich Class Housing Scheme

In 1993 the Society was appointed by the government to implement the Sandwich Class Housing Loan Scheme, under which a total of HK$2.7 billion was given out in loans. Alongside it, 10 estates under the Sandwich Class Housing Scheme were built, providing 8,920 flats; the first project, Tivoli Garden in Tsing Yi, was completed in 1995.

The sandwich class — households earning too much for public rental housing but too little for the private market at its peaks — was the defining Hong Kong housing problem of the 1990s, and the Society was the instrument chosen to address it. The scheme's combination of loans and purpose-built estates is a characteristic Housing Society pattern: a targeted, time-limited intervention, run by an independent body at arm's length from government, aimed at a specific gap in the housing ladder. Rural public housing, full market value developments and, later, subsidised sale flats projects such as Greenview Villa in Tsing Yi, launched in 2013 to help middle-income families purchase homes, extended the same gap-filling logic.

Housing for an ageing population

No theme runs more strongly through the Society's later work than ageing. Hong Kong's population is among the longest-lived in the world, and the Society moved early to design housing around older residents. Its Senior Citizen Residences Scheme produced purpose-built elderly housing, of which The Tanner Hill is listed among its signature developments, combining residential units with care and support services on site.

The Society set up the first Elderly Resources Centre in Hong Kong to promote the concept of the age-friendly home, and its Hong Kong Housing Society Academy and elderly services extend that work into training, research and community support. The Ageing-in-Place Scheme of 2013 applied the same thinking to its ordinary rental estates, coordinating housing, healthcare and social support for elderly tenants in their own homes. In a city where the first public housing tenants of the 1950s and 1960s aged in place in the estates the Society built, this work closed a circle that began with Sheung Li Uk.

Property management, leasing and building services

Alongside development, the Society is a substantial property manager and landlord in its own right. Its services include property management and commercial leasing across its estates and developments, loan services, and building management and maintenance support for the wider community through its Building Management and Maintenance Scheme. Including estates managed on behalf of other bodies, the Society's management portfolio has been counted in past reporting at over 80,000 residential units with a population of about 230,000.

Commercial leasing within its estates — shops and facilities serving estate residents — forms part of the self-financing model: the Society receives no government subvention for its operations and funds its work from rents, sales proceeds and investment income, applying surpluses to new housing projects. That financial independence, established by the structure of the original 1948-1952 settlement — a charitable grant, a repayable government loan and concessionary land — is what makes the Society a statutory body of an unusual kind: publicly purposed, but financially self-standing.

Transitional housing and recent work

The Society marked its 70th anniversary in 2018, at a reception officiated by the Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, who described it as an important partner of the government in implementing housing policy, assuming the unique role of housing laboratory in trying out innovative schemes. That year the Society launched its T-Home schemes to help increase the supply of transitional housing, applying its development and management capacity to Hong Kong's acute short-term housing shortage for families awaiting public rental housing.

Its recent programme combines the old and new strands of its work: subsidised sale flats for middle-income households, redevelopment of its older rental estates, elderly housing, transitional housing, and urban renewal projects undertaken in partnership with the Urban Renewal Authority and government. The Society's official history and milestones, published at hkhs.com, record the sequence decade by decade, and its annual and sustainability reports document current production and management figures.

Governance and place in Hong Kong's housing system

The Society is governed by its members through its Supervisory Board and Executive Committee structure under its incorporation ordinance, with a professional executive headed by a chief executive officer and executive director. Past chairmen recorded in reference works include Marco Wu, who chaired the Society at its 70th anniversary in 2018. Its members are drawn from community and professional life rather than appointed as government officials, preserving the voluntary, civic character of the 1948 founding committee within a statutory form.

Within Hong Kong's housing system the Society occupies the space between the Hong Kong Housing Authority — the government's own landlord, housing a far larger population — and the private developer market. It is smaller than the Authority but older as an independent body, and its freedom to experiment at modest scale is precisely its systemic value. Schemes proven by the Society, from urban improvement to subsidised sale and elderly residences, informed the mainstream programmes that followed.

The Housing Society today

Today the Hong Kong Housing Society continues from its World Trade Centre headquarters as an independent, self-financing, non-profit statutory body, providing rental estates, subsidised sale flats, elderly housing, transitional housing, property management and building services. By its own and reference counts it has developed more than 60,000 to 73,000 homes across its schemes over more than seven decades — reference sources give the cumulative figure as over 73,000 units under all schemes — and houses around 130,000 residents.

For a directory of Hong Kong institutions, the Society is a significant entry: founded from a GBP 14,000 London relief grant in the ruins of the post-war housing crisis, builder of Hong Kong's first rental estate in 1952, and still, three-quarters of a century later, the territory's designated experimenter in new forms of public housing. Its story, documented in its official history, its published reports and its Wikipedia entry, is one of the clearest examples in Hong Kong of a civic initiative becoming a permanent public institution.