Tiny flats will make up a bigger part of next year’s batch of subsidised homes to be sold by Hong Kong’s Housing Authority, with some set to be as small as 186 sq ft – the equivalent of 1½ car parking spaces and the tiniest to be offered since the start of the Home Ownership Scheme in 1978.

The 320 small units, located in a development at the site of the former airport at Kai Tak, will be among the 8,926 subsidised flats to hit the market in the first quarter of next year, according to a source close to the Housing Authority.

About 30 per cent of the new batch will be smaller than 322 sq ft, the source said. Such flats are increasingly making up a bigger portion of the authority’s supply, accounting for 22 per cent in 2020 and 15 per cent in 2019.

The smallest flats will be located at the redeveloped site of the former airport at Kai Tak.

The Home Ownership Scheme is designed to enable low- to middle-income households to buy affordable flats.

Francis Lam Ka-fai, vice-president of the Institute of Surveyors and its spokesman on housing policy, said he supported the generous discounts on the units, but slammed the tiny flats on offer in the new batch, saying they had “become a joke”.

“That’s really undesirable. Why did [the authority] go for such small units? I don’t know what their rationale is,” he said. “In terms of the design, [anything] less than 200 sq ft is really undesirable for anybody.”

The 2022 batch of flats will be located in seven mostly urban areas: Kai Tak, North Point, Ma Tau Kok, Kwun Tong, Tseung Kwan O, Sha Tin and Tung Chung.

Ranging from 186 sq ft to 479 sq ft, they will be sold at 49 per cent less than the market value, or between HK$1.24 million and HK$5.31 million (US$158,900 to US$680,600).

The 186 sq ft units at Kai Tak, priced at HK$8,530 per square foot, are going for HK$1.59 million. A list on the authority’s website of flat sizes at all past Home Ownership Scheme projects indicates the Kai Tak units will be the smallest.

But the authority on Tuesday said the figures for the new flats were just provisional, and the exact prices and flat sizes were subject to adjustment as building floor plans were yet to be finalised. A paper on the pricing and sales arrangement has been sent to the authority’s subsidised housing committee for approval.

The Post reported in November that the authority was planning to build smaller flats in coming projects as it was under pressure to meet the government’s housing target.

In Hong Kong, the world’s most expensive property market, private developers have increasingly taken to building shoebox homes known as “nano flats” in a bid to attract buyers who cannot afford bigger ones.

The government has acknowledged that such cramped living spaces were a “pain point for society”, with officials pledging to increase the size of public housing units by 10 or 20 per cent in the long run, and to establish a minimum flat size for the private sector.

Tseung Kwan O is another planned location for some of next year’s subsidised flats.

Asked about the shrinking flats, Cleresa Wong Pie-yue, chair of the authority’s subsidised housing committee, said some buyers were singles living on their own, and might prefer to live in a smaller space within their budget.

Wong said she supported the idea of a minimum size for flats in the long run, but declined to offer a starting point, adding the ideal size depended on practical considerations like housing supply and affordability.

“A four-person family may perhaps consider looking at flats bigger than 400 sq ft,” she said.

Family applicants are given priority over singles in the allocation of Home Ownership Scheme flats, though 10 per cent of the units are reserved for the latter.

Households of two or more people must earn no more than HK$69,740 a month and own assets worth less than HK$1.85 million to be eligible for the scheme, while singles must have a salary of no more than HK$34,730 and assets worth no more than HK$925,000.

Meanwhile, to curb speculation in the Home Ownership Scheme, the Authority intends to make future buyers wait longer before reselling their flats. The plan is to require owners to wait for five years, rather than two, before they can sell their units on the scheme’s secondary market, where buyers are either tenants of public rental housing or those on the waiting list for such homes.

If owners want to resell on the free market, they would have to wait 15 years, up from 10.

The authority will also offer another 4,700 units under the Green Form Subsidised Home Ownership Scheme, which is exclusively for public housing tenants or those close to getting an offer. Located in Fanling, Yau Tong and Ma On Shan, those units will sell for 41 per cent of their market price.