In his policy address, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying made housing and land supply a priority. He said the government is pursuing numerous measures to increase land supply, including rezoning green belt and other sites, building or extending new towns in the northern New Territories and on Lantau, using brownfield sites and carrying out reclamation outside the harbour.

These will effect ecology, water quality and urban air ventilation to varying degrees, which means we must ensure housing is planned sustainably. Unfortunately, sound planning is in danger of being sacrificed to speed and ambition. Are such sacrifices warranted?

Leung said that, in the next five years, 97,100 public housing units will come online, as well as 87,000 private units in the next three to four years. This is part of a long-term target which aims to produce 460,000 new flats by 2025-26. Is this realistic?

Let us review some statistics. In mid-2015, our population was roughly 7.3 million. With an average household size of around 2.9, it translates to 2,485,200 households. Housing stock was 2,668,000 units – a 93 per cent occupancy rate. This is slightly tighter than the 91 per cent rate in 2005, when we had 2,197,100 households to 2,408,000 housing units. So while it is true that the housing supply – public housing especially – has not grown as fast as household numbers, the situation is not exactly dire. We have an affordability problem, not a supply problem.