ERNEST KAO ERNEST.KAO@SCMP.COM
PUBLISHED : Monday, 07 September, 2015, 12:01am
UPDATED : Monday, 07 September, 2015, 12:01am
Tenants are paying ever more for tiny flats. Photo: Nora Tam
Meals are a tricky affair in the subdivided flat Peace Chu shares with her husband and their daughter.
So tiny is their Tai Kok Tsui home that the family must all be seated – one on the edge of a bed – before their dining table-cum-work desk is set up. Despite the poor conditions, her landlord has continually increased their rent for the space of less than 100 sq ft.
“The rent was HK$2,000 per month when we first moved here [in 2007], but it is now HK$3,500,” said Chu, who works part-time as a housemaid when she can, while her husband takes up temporary contract jobs.
“Plus water and electricity, we now pay about HK$4,500 in rent and utilities, which is about half of our household income.”
People who live in subdivided flats are seeing higher than average rent increases, and the costs are increasingly eating into their meagre incomes, a community group has found.
And they were at risk of being left high and dry when the third round of low-income subsidies from the government’s Community Care Fund ends next year, the Society for Community Organisation(Soco) warned.
Over 70 per cent of the 71 subdivided flat tenants in the survey claimed to have been hit by rent increases between 2013 and this year, with the median increase at 18 per cent per year.
By comparison, the average rent increase over the same period was 11.8 per cent for private flats and14.6 per cent for small homes.
“The obvious trend will be that more [of these residents] will be forced to move into smaller and smaller flats,” said Soco community organiser Angela Lui Yi-shan. “This is a very extreme and inappropriate phenomenon.”
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/1855892/tiny-room-pricey-rent-raw-deal-hong-kong-subdivided-flat
