Some Hong Kong flats have been subdivided into more than 20 cubicles of only a few square metres. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
Five floors above a bustling market in Hong Kong's Mong Kok district, best known for its iconic neon lights that cast red and blue smudges across the steaming bitumen, Coco Au lives in a meticulously organised home.
Hanging from hooks above her head when she sleeps are plastic bags filled with her belongings beside a few clothes.
Behind the bed are some small plush toys that keep her company at night.
Coco Au lives in a flat that has been divided into 26 rooms. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
"Here, one person lives, and there's another person living upstairs," she says of her home.
"You can see, [this apartment] has 26 rooms."
Her room would not be larger than 6 square metres, while her upstairs neighbour's appears to be even smaller.
Social advocates estimate there are well over 200,000 people living in premises like Ms Au, which are referred to as subdivided flats.
They aren't the only kind of tiny housing common in the financial centre.
There are even smaller rooms known as coffin or cage homes, although they can be difficult to categorise.
Hong Kong authorities have recorded about 110,000 subdivided flats in the city — a figure that doesn't include coffin homes and cage homes.
About 60 per cent are in Kowloon, which includes Mong Kok, 14 per cent are on Hong Kong's main island and 24 per cent are in the New Territories, the city's northern-most region, according to the deputy director of the Society for Community Organisation, Sze Lai Shan.
"There are single people, but also there are families with children," she says.
"We estimate there are around 50,000 children, under 18, living in these kinds of conditions."
Another tenant, Ms Lee, who lives a few streets away, shares her flat with about nine other women.
Ms Lee and the women she lives with work around each others' schedules. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
"Several of us work in restaurants, two are security guards, all working night shifts," she explains.
"I work the morning shift, start at 8am, finish at 6pm — when I leave, they are still asleep, so I go downstairs to buy breakfast.
"We accommodate each other in every aspect, for example, with cooking, you cook first, then I cook, we don't argue about anything, we're very in sync and very harmonious."
The government is cracking down on Hong Kong's subdivided flats. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
World's most unaffordable housing
Hong Kong has the least affordable housing in the world, an unenviable title it's held for well over a decade.
It's a place where real estate is king, but the divide between the well off and those locked out of the market is dire.
The apartment towers more typical of Hong Kong's old neighbourhoods. (Foreign Correspondent: Fletcher Yeung)
The Chinese communist government has ordered Hong Kong authorities to "bid farewell" to subdivided flats, coffin homes and cage homes by 2049, characterising the city's shortage of homes a "deep-rooted problem".
"If you look at the statistics, there are currently around 2.9 million permanent residential flats in Hong Kong, but we only have 2.7 [million] domestic households," says Brian Wong of Liber Research Community.
"I could reasonably deduce that there is a huge number of vacant flats in Hong Kong, at the moment it is mainly due to the fact that there is no vacancy tax.
"And it is quite a common practice for the private developers to build and then wait until they see a good price before they sell it.
"By controlling the number of flats on the housing market, the private developers can practically control price."
In response to the ABC's questions, Hong Kong's Housing Bureau said in a statement that "there is no imminent need to introduce a vacancy tax" in the city because the vacancy rate for private residences is low, about 4.1 per cent at the end of 2023.
Ms Au, 70, has been living in subdivided flats for nearly 30 years she says, the current one for a decade, during which time she’s been on the waiting list for public housing.
Ms Au has been waiting a long time for public housing. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
Hong Kong authorities say the average wait time for public housing is five-and-a-half years.
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Photo shows Aerial shot of dozens of houses in neat rows in a new outer-suburban housing estate.
"If you need to use the bathroom, you have to compete," Ms Au says.
"Sometimes, if you have a stomach ache and someone is in the bathroom, you have to endure it, it's not good."
Advocates say this density of living causes all sorts of social and health problems.
There can be dozens of people living in a flat that might have only been designed to house a family of four or five, putting pressure on the pipes while ventilation is also a huge issue.
"[There's] a lot of social conflict, a lot of family conflicts will arise from that poor housing environment," Mr Wong says.
"In the age of pandemic, the ventilation is a problem, because if you have visited a subdivided flat, quite often you can smell an odour coming down from the toilet from the pipes, because … the pipes are all overloaded.
"So this situation, basically, I would say is kind of a modern slum of Hong Kong … it's kind of invisible to the outsiders and even the government hadn't really done a serious stocktake on all the subdivided flats until recent years."
Brian Wong says there are plenty of vacant flats in Hong Kong. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
Housing fix might push up rents
In his October policy address, Hong Kong's leader John Lee announced plans to phase out subdivided flats smaller than 8 square metres, and those without their own toilet or window.
Deputy Financial Secretary Michael Wong Wai-lun said about 30 per cent of the city's subdivided flats meet that criteria.
This reform wouldn't apply to coffin or cage homes, which are already regulated under other rules.
The famous Hong Kong public housing block Choi Hung Estate, which means rainbow in Cantonese. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
"We also want to ensure the new system will be able to tell the market, which in some way needs to exist by the sheer evidence that over 110,000 households are living in this accommodation [that] we want this market to be healthy in its existence," Mr Lee said in October.
"I think we have to be realistic as to why subdivided flats [have existed] for a long period of time — because of need, because of the actual need of households, because of a lack of enough supply of flats. So we have to be realistic, pragmatic.
"It is not easy, but I am determined, and I think society supports that we should solve the problem."
Cutting the number of subdivided flats might drive up the price of those remaining on the market, an advocate says. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
But critics argue this proposal will only make the housing crisis worse, especially for those that can least afford it.
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Photo shows Eliana Cheung in Hong Kong.
"What worries the tenants most is that it will only push up the rent of the remaining subdivided flats," Mr Wong says.
"They have nowhere to go, they are waiting for public housing.
"They have to survive, they have to struggle in the shrinking informal housing sector."
In its statement, the Housing Bureau said the registration of compliant sub-divided units would happen gradually over 12-18 months.
It added that landlords would have a grace period which “may last for 12 or up to 24 months” afterwards to make arrangements with their tenants and to get the units up to scratch.
Ms Au is also sceptical of the new policy.
"If they want to renovate a house here, it must have windows and a toilet," she says.
"It's not feasible because many landlords would need to invest money, and they won't do that.
"So, most of the time, it can't be done."
The district of Kai Tak has been picked as the location for 10,000 "light public housing" flats. (ABC News: Fletcher Yeung)
Temporary solution concerns communities
To address the long public housing waiting list and alleviate some of that pressure, Hong Kong's government plans to build 30,000 temporary units, which it calls light public housing.
They are meant to provide transitional housing, for those most in need of public homes.
But some of the residents of the communities where they'll be placed aren't happy.
Kai Tak is a relatively new community on Kowloon.
It was promised to be another CBD, but residents say those plans haven't been realised.
The government is now going to put 10,000 light public housing units near the train station, to be removed after five years.
"The original city planning is very impressive … the area [picked] for the light public housing was [supposed to be] entertainment, commercial," a local homeowner tells the ABC.
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Photo shows A man and a woman sitting on a front deck with a white cat in front of them
Such is the political crackdown on the city since the 2019 protests, some are fearful of speaking out, even on a domestic issue like this.
"The original city plan does not support that many people to live here, but now suddenly, in a small plot of land within Kai Tak there will be 30,000 people," the homeowner says.
"Whether the transport station, the social facilities, whether it can support this many people, this population — I've heard a lot of concern in the neighbourhood."
The Housing Bureau says the light public housing project in Kai Tak is expected to be in place for only five years once it’s built, and won’t delay the long term plans for the site.
Only about 4 kilometres away, back in Mong Kok, Ms Sze welcomes the government's plans to lift the standard of the subdivided homes.
But she wants to see more done to lift standards of living overall.
"Eventually we hope there's no subdivided home or cage home or cubicle home in Hong Kong," Ms Sze says.
"And besides they have yet to consider [how] to include the cage home or cubicles.
"So we think they should include that and then have a timetable to eradicate this kind of housing."
Hong Kong has the least affordable housing in the world. (Foreign Correspondent: Fletcher Yeung)
