Hong Kong Land Program for Natives Is Ground for Criticism

Gender and pedigree may not be all it takes to get ahead in the world these days. But they’re all it takes to get a piece of one of the most precious commodities in Hong Kong: land.

Any adult male who can prove that he is descended from the aboriginal dwellers of the outlying New Territories can apply to the government for his own patch of land on which to build a home.

The aim of the 1972 policy was to help preserve the residency rights and unique culture of the area’s indigenous people--villagers whose ancestral holdings were snatched away by the British soon after Hong Kong became a crown colony in the 19th century.

But the land-grant program has come under fire from critics who decry its sexism and say it has turned into little more than a moneymaking scheme for native sons who claim property, build houses, then rent or sell them to waiting homeowners and developers. In Hong Kong’s overheated real estate market, that can mean a small fortune.

“Basically, it’s a huge scandal caused by good intentions,” said Kevin Sinclair, a local writer who is highly critical of the “small-houses” policy, named after the dwellings the applicants are allowed to build on their designated plots.

So far, 24,000 such houses have been erected in the New Territories, a 350-square-mile swath of often virgin land north of this city’s famous downtown skyline. In addition, 9,223 applications for land grants were still pending at the end of last year, according to government statistics.

The houses occupy a maximum of 700 square feet of land and contain up to three stories. Each house can therefore boast as much as 2,100 square feet of floor space--an incredible amount in Hong Kong, where whole families live in apartments less than a quarter that size.

Having just one floor seems inordinately luxurious to most Hong Kongers.

“I used to make the comment when I moved in, ‘Oh, 700 square feet--that’s a small place,’ ” said Mal Paylor, a transplanted Englishman who lives in the village of Clear Water Bay. “But the people here say, ‘Oh, 700 square feet--that’s big.’ ”

Paylor, 40, and his wife moved into their apartment five years ago. On the floor above lives a Belgian tenant; below is a fellow Briton.

“It’s a small place,” he said of his community. “And it’s mostly foreigners.”

That scenario is repeated throughout villages in the New Territories, in homes that the government had envisioned would be occupied by the male heirs of the indigenous folk who lived here in or before 1898, the cutoff year specified by the policy.

Instead, so many of the homes have been rented or sold to non-indigenous residents that the trend defeats the original purpose of the land-grant program, said Zachary Wang, a district councilor from the New Territories.

The government once told Wang that 20% of the small houses were bought or rented by non-indigenous people, an estimate that he thinks is low. “The aim of the small-houses policy--to improve the indigenous environment--[has] changed to a commercial scheme,” Wang said.

Indeed, critics say the land is often claimed by descendants who live abroad and have no intention of returning to Hong Kong but who see an opportunity to cash in on their birthright. They apply for a plot, build a home, hold on to it for at least a year as required by the government, then rent or sell.

It can be a lucrative enterprise. In the pretty seaside village of Sai Kung, on the eastern edge of the New Territories, a new apartment can go for $1,500 a month, allowing the owner who rents out all three floors of a home to recoup his building costs in less than three years. The entire structure, which might cost $150,000 to build, can sell for nearly $800,000.

Indigenous representatives defend the small-houses policy, which they describe as only partial recompense for what their ancestors suffered at the hands of grasping Britons.

“All indigenous villagers would regard it as a type of compensation for the unjust treatment dealt to them by the government since 1898,” said Andrew Wong, an ex officio member of the Heung Yee Kuk, the villagers’ representative body. “It is entirely for the owners of the houses to dispose of [them] any way they like.”

The Hong Kong government has promised to reevaluate the policy. But any attempt to scrap it will probably meet with opposition from Heung Yee Kuk patriarchs, who waged an aggressive fight a few years ago to preserve their custom of allowing only men to inherit property, except when it is specifically willed to a woman.

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Chu of The Times’ Beijing Bureau was recently on assignment in Hong Kong.