Hong Kong's 'coffin homes' and the fight against subpar housing

Living in very few square feet, with little room to move and no privacy—this is the reality for hundreds of thousands of people in the highly populated city of Hong Kong, who live in what has been dubbed 'coffin homes' or 'cage homes', like the one pictured here.

Although the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has now been pushing for a real estate reform against subpar housing, it's unlikely that these glorified stalls will be affected.

According to The New York Times, Hong Kong Executive Leader John Lee announced in October that the city would impose minimum standards on apartment size and accommodations. Currently, these abodes typically house bathrooms and kitchens in the same space.

According to The New York Times, around 220,000 people in Hong Kong, including 40,000 children, live in these subdivided homes, a glaring example of social inequality in the city.

The policy promised by the Hong Kong leader is expected to phase out more than 30,000 of the smaller subdivided homes.

However, the “coffin houses,” which typically house just one bed, are considered only dormitories and won't be affected by the new policy, per the Hong Kong Free Press.

The order to fix the housing crisis came from above. According to The New York Times, Beijing has urged the Hong Kong government to get rid of these micro-houses by 2049, because it considers the city's housing shortage to be one of the causes of the anti-government riots in 2019.

Hong Kong has nearly 7.5 million inhabitants, but there is almost no more land left to develop. As a result, its real estate market has become the most expensive in the world, according to National Geographic.

But John Lee's plan has raised concerns among public housing experts and advocates. They say the move could further increase rents for the poorest people and drive out many more, while leaving the city's worst housing type, coffin houses, untouched.

In Hong Kong, the average living space per person is just over 60 square feet (about 6 square meters), according to The New York Times. Landlords divide units into smaller spaces to rent them out to more people. These are the homes that the government wants to regulate.

According to an example given by National Geographic, the owner of a 35-square-meter apartment divided it to accommodate 20 double-decker bunk beds. The rental price of one of these spaces? 200 Hong Kong dollars per month, or about 25 US dollars.

The new policy promoted by the city government requires that apartments have at least a separate kitchen and bathroom (in many of these spaces they occupy the same place). But it remains to be seen how the necessary renovations will be carried out and who will pay for them.

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