The anticipated housing pathways of homeownership of young people in Hong Kong

Abstract

Using semi-structured interviews with 160 university students, this paper analyses the anticipated housing pathways of young Chinese in Hong Kong and compares between local Hong Kong and non-local mainland students. We identify six different anticipated housing pathways by considering differences in expectations of parental support and perceptions about the affordability of homeownership. We find that expectations of financial support from parents are particularly important for non-local mainland students than for local Hong Kong students. The perception about the affordability of homeownership is not statistically significantly different between the groups. We find that 18% of all university students considered in our sample might be able to buy a high-quality private housing in the future, 12% might be constrained to less lucrative housing options such as renting public housing, and 70% might anticipate diverse housing pathways. Our findings suggest that the government should implement measures to tackle intergenerational poverty and housing segregation in the light of the diverse housing pathways of young Chinese in Hong Kong.