Space and scale: A study of development intensity and housing price in Hong Kong

Sustainable urbanization requires an intensive use of land for housing development to accommodate a fast-growing urban population. Large housing estates which comprise multi-storey housing blocks and a shared use of common facilities are often built to meet the housing needs. This study examines the relationship between development intensity of housing estate and housing price in the compact urban environment of Hong Kong. It posits that in addition to the internal flat size, the development intensity of housing estate can separately influence the value of individual housing unit. Housing development intensity in this study is theorized to involve both “spaciousness” and “scale” of the housing estate. The hypotheses are tested by a hedonic pricing model using 423 balanced transaction data of dwelling units from a random sample of 50 housing projects in a district of Hong Kong. The analysis has revealed that, while the buyers tend to pay more for a larger amount of internal and external housing space, there is an “ideal range” of development scale measured in terms of the total number of dwelling units in a housing estate. The policy implication to the hyper-dense cities like Hong Kong is that its urban planning and development control regulations should address the issues of development scale and neighborhood sharing of public space, rather than the level of total floor space, within a mass housing estate.