Kwan Tsui Hang slams gov’t for outsourcing housing

The directly elected lawmaker Kwan Tsui Hang has criticized the government for addressing local housing demand chiefly with land situated outside the city. Speaking on TDM’s forum show held yesterday, she urged the government to roll out effective measures to alleviate the high population density in the territory too.
Her criticism came when yesterday morning’s discussion touched on the acute shortage of housing units in the city.
“How many kilometers can reclamation generate? [The projects] would finish only many years later,” said Kwan, “If [the population] continues to grow at the current rate, it would be more full on the land reclaimed. All the roads and transport [links] would not be able to support [the growing population].”
Yet, the palpable pressure on local population for Li Jiazeng, a scholar from the City University of Macau on economic development, was merely medium-high level, which he called nowhere close to “serious.” His conclusion was made after comparing Macau with the Indian city of Bombay and Dhaka in Bangladesh, as well as some other Chinese mainland cities.
The 65-year-old policymaker, who objected to Li’s viewpoint, stressed that the current population is growing at an unreasonable speed, which the authorities and society should be highly concerned about.
Another forum participant was the president of the New Macau Association, Sulu Sou, who also derided the mainland scholar’s comparison. He then questioned what the city would become after all the social-related facilities were relocated outside to the mainland. By that time, as he said, even Macau’s cultural identity would also be compromised.
“If we moved all the residential homes for the aged, schools, clinics and enterprises to Hengqin, what’s left in Macau? Macau’s local culture and history would [subsequently] disappear?”
Currently, the city’s population per square kilometer reached 20,500 people, which has made it rank among the top regions with the highest population density in the world.