Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
HK$2.15 billion and New World Development, HK$1.3 billion (Poon
2006).
2
Each of these conglomerates has been involved in large projects
in Vancouver.
The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong
contained a clause permitting the normal release of only 50 hectares of
undeveloped land onto the private market each year, reinforcing a psychol-
ogy of scarcity and price inflation, and guaranteeing the flow of government
land revenues. Through the 1990s land sales and related taxes accounted
for on average 30 percent of total government revenues.
3
The modest annual
land release also contributed to a 12-year bull market in property that con-
tinued until the bubble burst in 1997. This 'land (re)development regime'
has significantly weighted economic and political hierarchies and priorities
(Tang 2008). So pervasive are property sales to the Hong Kong way of life
that half-page advertisements for new developments commonly displace
world news on the front page of newspapers (Cheng 2001). Exaggerated
land commodification means that 'the exchange value of property has an
absolute supremacy over the value of use' (Tang 2008: 357).
Property ownership in Hong Kong has contributed powerfully to rising
social mobility and the making of a propertied middle-class. A doubling of
property prices between 1985 and 1989, and a further tripling from 1989
to 1994 (Smart and Lee 2003), provided the basis of household wealth for
many millionaire migrants to Vancouver. While Hong Kong incomes show
marked inequality, the homeownership rate doubled from 25 to 50 percent
between 1981 and 2001, spreading the benefits of real estate appreciation
(Yip et al. 2007). The 130,000 households who owned flats larger than 70
square metres saw price gains of between 100 and 200 percent between
1991 and 1995, with larger flats gaining the most (Forrest and Lee 2004).
Such property inflation would produce sales prices ranging from
$CAD375,000 for smaller units to $CAD1.75 million for the largest in
1995, at a time when average house prices in Toronto were at around
$200,000 and in Vancouver $300,000. However, the collapse of the Hang
Seng stock market and the bursting of the property bubble at the end of
1997 led to a prolonged slump with huge casualties among the middle-
class. In 2003, 130,000 households were estimated to be in a state of nega-
tive equity (Poon 2006: 52).
Reflecting and reproducing local values, mortgages were not available
for property more than 30 years old (Smart and Lee 2003). A cultural
anthropology of property in Hong Kong leaves no room for sentimental-
ity. Older structures were regarded as too obsolete to play a significant
role in the land market; they amounted to an inconsequential backwater.
This predisposition against the old and toward the new was to make a
distinctive impress upon participation in Canadian urban real estate.
Hong Kong architecture, writes Ackbar Abbas, is committed to profit and
