I see the people who proposed that young couples should be housed in containers parked under fly-overs have retired hurt, having heard a lot of criticism of their proposal. Maybe the critics were right: housing schemes of this kind are a technical matter on which lay opinions are not worth very much. But the people who suggested this were right about the big picture: we need to think of something.
The hard fact about housing in Hong Kong is that it is no longer feasible for young people even to dream of a home of their own unless they have rich parents. Prices, even for tiny flats, have outrun the sort of salaries most people can hope for in their 20s, and indeed for many the sort of salary they can hope for ever. This has a variety of bad effects, ranging from acute unhappiness, frustration and alienation in the people directly affected to important social effects like the declining birth rate, as couples put off babies in the hope of finding accommodation fit for two and a half people later in their lives. This is not a problem which is going to be solved by dickering with the stamp duty rules, or by poking about for bits of community land which can be reclassified as housing. Nor will it be solved by market forces. Mainlanders will always be willing to pay silly prices because for mainlanders it is worth paying a premium to get their wealth into the outside world where they can spend it without being arrested.
Hong Kong used to have a reputation for creative solutions to housing problems. This was not for our new towns or public housing, which closely followed models in other places, but for a thing called Temporary Housing Areas. These were a creative solution to a shortage: unused patches of land of the kind which now tend to become open-air car parks were paved and fitted with a set of roofs. The occupant was allocated his roof and built the rest of the hut (these were hardly big enough to qualify as houses) himself. Toilets and showers were in communal blocks. THAs were not confused with paradise but they accommodated a lot of people without costing much money. At the time they filled a need. A lot of visitors from places with housing problems (and perhaps a bit more space than we have) came to look at them and were impressed.
I do not suggest that THAs should be revived. But they emerged from the sort of creative spirit we need now and are not getting. Last time I was in London I stayed in a place which had been converted from an office block into a sort of budget flat hotel aimed at the student market. We had one room for living, sleeping and eating, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom which was actually quite big because of a quirk in the shape of the building. This sort of thing would not be anyone’s dream first home but it would beat living with the in-laws hands down. Are there no buildings in Hong Kong which would fit this sort of treatment? Dare I suggest the West Wing?
tim's experiment 
While you’re working on the brainbender issue for Hong Kong (and we’re grateful for all the ideas you can come up with), don’t forget to make room for 300,000 FDHs and, if you’re going to be truly just and right in principle, a few hundred thousand more from other needy places like Chad. You’d be right but goodness knows we don’t have enough flyovers in this concrete jungle to house them, you and me, too.
Needy people in other countries have nothing to do with it. Governments which deliberately distort the market for their own purposes have an obligation to mitigate the effects on their citizens. Abandoning the policy of keeping land prices, rents etc. high would also work, but failing that, inaction is not acceptable.
I do not have to make room for 300,000 FDHs because the Court of Final Appeal has solved that problem. Don’t you read the papers? However I think you might find the world a less threatening place if you disregarded official attempts to scare people into supporting particular policies.
It may be (though official figures of this kind have turned out to be wildly wrong before) that there are 300,000 FDHs who would be eligible to apply for residency if the law was changed. However some of them would not apply, some of those who apply would be refused, some of those who succeed would die, move on to Canada or return to the Phils for reasons of their own, and some of those who apply, succeed and stay would remain in the accommodation supplied by their employers.Believe it or not there are employers who supply decent accommodation for their helpers, and after all it is free. So 300,000 was a fiction intended to frighten the gullible. Sleep easy.