Environmental group Green Sense is calling on the government to reduce the number of immigrants from the mainland, saying the population growth has forced the government to rezone the city’s greenbelt land.
A study conducted by the group and released on Tuesday reveals that more than 110 hectares of land, about the size of six Victoria Parks, have been rezoned for residential buildings in the past five years during former chief executive Leung Chun-ying’s administration.
Leung’s popularity rates had been low throughout the period he was in office, but his policies to push for new land had significantly boosted housing supply, though prices continued to soar.
Green Sense’s president, Roy Tam, said yesterday that the rezoned sites were originally used as community halls, government facilities, open space or greenbelt land. These sites, Tam said, were valuable buffer sites that had a cooling effect among the city’s high-rise buildings, according to Apple Daily.
However, in the same period, more than 300,000 mainlanders had migrated to Hong Kong using one-way permits via the government’s Quality Migrant Admission Scheme as well as other programs, something the group said the government must reduce going forward if it hopes to ease Hong Kong’s ever-growing housing pressure.
“In the past five years, the number of immigrants had effectively cancelled out the number of newly built housing units. Therefore, [the government should] stop accumulating new debts when the old ones haven’t been cleared,” Tam said.
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