Hong Kong Residents Forced to Live in Coffin Homes

It may not look like your average home, but concrete water pipes could become the solution to Hong Kong's housing shortage and high property prices.

The world's most expensive property market has seen private home prices hit a record-breaking run of twelve consecutive monthly gains, adding to home ownership constraints.

Mass produced, durable and cheap to convert housing could help ease the housing problem. Architect James Law believes the 120 square ft giant water pipes make for a perfect micro-housing that could become the norm for people looking for temporary housing.

OPod, the water pipe home built by Law's team, is only a prototype design at this stage, and can only be launched if the government approves such housing.

However, Law believes it can be a new model of accommodation in Hong Kong as it only upcycles existing concrete pipes. More importantly the cost of OPods is significantly cheaper compared to conventional developments.

"My vision is that in our city in order to use OPods we can actually try to use land that is not currently suitable for conventional development. So what are these pieces of land?

So sometimes there's land leftover between buildings which are narrow so it's not easy to build a new building, we could put some OPods in there and utilise that land that could be right in the centre of the city," says the 46-year-old who was born and raised in Hong Kong.

Across the territory, the average price for apartments is around HK$12,000 (around $1,534) per square foot (HK$130,000 ($16,623) per square meter), partly because of a supply and demand imbalance.

A report by UBS ranked Hong Kong as the world's most expensive city for apartments where the average living space is just 150 square feet per person.

As a result developers are increasingly designing more "nano flats", units smaller than 200 square feet, to counter the short land supply.

There have been attempts to tackle the financial centre's housing shortage through various stamp duties, but the government has been reluctant, until recently, to use prefabricated modular housing.

Hidden in the suburban areas, shipping container homes have popped up thanks to its cheap production cost.

Tommy Wong, co-founder of Markbox that has been manufacturing container houses in Hong Kong for three years, said demand for container houses have doubled in the last year, adding that they're struggling to meet the surge in requests.

According to Markbox it takes around three months to assemble and turn a shipping container into a liveable space for around HK$50,000 ($6,393).

While it is legal to renovate shipping containers into liveable spaces, living in one is against the law.

He wants the government to quickly implement guidelines to allow people to live in shipping containers saying that it's a more affordable alternative to nanoflats which can cost up to HK$3 million ($383,610).

"(Hong Kong's) laws are very behind. It's unlike other countries where there's plenty of land and they encourage people to use the land and perhaps even use container homes. Our needs are different, the government has many conservation policies and there's been no change in policies at all," Wong said.

Container houses can measure up to 200 square feet, fitted with a bathroom, electric plugs and space for a coffee table.

However, for the city's poorer, they resort to other illegal dwellings such as subdivided apartments - a full size apartment of about 600 square feet divided into four or even smaller units.

Another way of housing Hong Kong's less well off citizens are tiny coffin homes where living conditions are poor.

The government has said responding to Reuters it will continue to implement measures to tackle the city's housing shortage, noting that it's exploring different forms of "transitional housing".