FLEXIBILITY IN HONG KONG PRIVATE HOUSING

This paper investigates the private housing in Hong Kong in terms of flexibility. Since the last few decades Hong Kong Government is steadily endeavoring to achieve a sustained and healthy development of private housing property market. With Hong Kong's economy on the rise, and its fertility rate being one of the lowest in the world, more people are looking for increased space standards even for higher price. Currently, around two-third of the population of Hong Kong lives in private flats. However, it is observed that these flats, especially the highrise housing estates do not come as open shell like the public housing estates do. This paper at first identifies the major prototypes of contemporary private housings built in the past few decades. Then it compares the flexibility of different prototypes in four sequential levels of construction i.e structure, envelop, building services and in fill. Flexibility is measured by means of potential layout options that the users practice inside these prototypes. It finds that some prototypes offer more flexibility than the others. It concludes that flexibility in recent private flats is gradually reducing. But on a positive note, they are offering more varieties in size and layout design in order to meet the increasing demand in spatial standards.