Revised affordable housing law to be put to vote before summer recess

The amended affordable housing law will be put to a vote at the Legislative Assembly (AL) before the parliamentary recess begins this summer. The AL’s Second Standing Committee, which is responsible for the amendment, announced yesterday that it will soon finish its analysis.
Chan Chak Mo, who presides over the committee, told journalists after a 30-minute closed-door meeting that the content in the act, revised by the government, has been refined after multiple discussions with the committee members and the legal advisory body over a number of months. The main purpose of the amendment is to uphold the principle of “draw before review.” This means changing a section of the law to ensure that during the draw, or ballot,  to select applicants for affordable housing, the administration need only conduct a preliminary evaluation of all applications, only then to be followed by verification of the qualifications of the applicants and the authenticity of the documents submitted. In this way, it will take less time for the Housing Bureau to process applications.
According to Chan, the new amendment might also require housing-unit applicants to submit “other documents that the Housing Bureau authorities perceive as necessary for the preliminary assessment.” These measures gained unanimous approval from the committee members, as these aspects of the amendment are thought to facilitate the application process.
“There is so much ambiguity and doubt in the application and assessment process, and also contradiction. The flexibility [to be introduced], out of good will, aims to simplify the application process,” said the committee head.
Next, the collective opinion of the commission members will be gathered, which will then go to the president of the AL so that he can initiate a final review and vote on the bill.
According to Chan, eligible applicants who have been wrongly excluded from the possible housing entitlement by the government might receive either financial compensation or be given a slot in the draw, an entitlement which was previously granted subject to the court’s verdict.
The new system, which allows the official draw to precede the qualification assessment, is believed to halve the current three-year period required to process the 42,000 applications that have been submitted for only 1,900 economic housing units that were rolled out in 2013. Staff reporter