The anticipated housing pathways to homeownership of young people in Hong Kong

Abstract

Using semi-structured interviews with 160 university students, this paper analyses the anticipated housing pathways of young Chinese in Hong Kong and compares between local Hong Kong and non-local mainland students. We identify six different anticipated housing pathways by considering differences in expectations of parental support and perceptions about the affordability of homeownership. We find that expectations of financial support from parents are particularly important for non-local mainland students than for local Hong Kong students. The perception about the affordability of homeownership is not statistically significantly different between the groups. We find that 18% of all university students considered in our sample might be able to buy a high-quality private housing in the future, 12% might be constrained to less lucrative housing options such as renting public housing, and 70% might anticipate diverse housing pathways. Our findings suggest that the government should implement measures to tackle intergenerational poverty and housing segregation in the light of the diverse housing pathways of young Chinese in Hong Kong.

Keywords:

• housing pathways
• parental support
• housing affordability
• young people
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Peter Mackie and anonymous reviewers for their outstanding comments and thank the Urban Research Group, Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong, for the excellent cooperation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The report uses the median multiple, which is the median house price divided by the gross median household income to assess housing affordability (Cox & Pavletich, 2015, p. 7). Hong Kong has a median multiple of 17 in 2014; this is the fifth consecutive time that Hong Kong is ranked least affordable (Cox & Pavletich, 2015). At the end of 2013, the medium home price was approximately HK$4.02 million, while the annual medium household income was roughly HK$270,000 (Liu, 2014).

2. The interviews were conducted at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Baptist University, Lingnan University and Hong Kong Institute of Education. The interviewees were randomly selected for interview at the universities’ main campuses or canteens. All interviews were conducted in English and were fully recorded with interviewees’ consent.

3. The other category includes those students who expect neither to borrow nor to receive parental support.

4. In China, the concept of filial piety is ‘the core of Chinese family culture’ or ‘the core of Confucian family values’ (Wang, 2010, pp. 963, 978).

5. In Chinese, there is a saying that implies this kind of behaviour: 上車 which translates as ‘getting on the bus’.

6. This figure is calculated based on the first row in Table 6. The six individuals who expect financial support from their parents are subtracted from the total number of 25 students, so that 19 students remain in this category.

Additional information

Funding

The financial support for this study was provided by the Institute of Future Cities of the Chinese University of Hong Kong [grant number CUHK-IOFC1402(01)]. We also received the financial support from REDBRIC for attending the UFSC 2050 conference in Lisbon to present this paper.