ABSTRACT
Hong Kong has one of the largest and most successful public housing systems in the world, in spite of the fact that it is well known as a bastion of markets and limited regulation. Public housing makes up a significant share of the city’s built environment, thus one might presume it segregates the city’s residents. It does not. This chapter shows that public housing actually reduces the city’s spatial segregation. This analysis uses a combination of methods, including indexes that explicitly account for space and the ordinal nature of income data. The effect of public housing on patterns of segregation varies across spatial scales of measurement and income groups. The spatial distance between low-income and middle-income households is reduced by public housing, creating mixed-income neighbourhoods. This, however, also increases the segregation of high-income households. The case of Hong Kong provides a strong counter-example to the common assumptions about the spatial impacts of supply-side housing policies. Additionally, it demonstrates the importance of supply-side intervention as cities grow as well as the potential benefits to maintaining public ownership of land and housing. The role of housing policies in urban spatial structure might not always be of high priority, given the complexity of the relationship; but it should be, given the importance of location in people’s lives.
