Photo taken on Sept. 18, 2019 shows residential buildings in Quarry Bay, south China's Hong Kong. Photo: Xinhua

A yearning for home seems to have in many cases left a bitter taste in the mouths of dream chasers in Hong Kong, the most expensive city on the planet in which to own a home. The bitterness is apparently intensified by a long waiting list for public rental housing.

In an attempt to address the local housing issue that has become even thornier amid the city's continued social unrest, the COVID-19 fallout on the local economy, and woes over the city's outlook arising from simmering China-US tensions, the idea of housing locals in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has emerged during the ongoing annual two sessions.

The proposal offers hope for easing the chronic housing pain haunting locals in the special administrative region (SAR). Yet, there is much skepticism about whether it would be a conceivable dream.

National People's Congress (NPC) deputies and members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) from the pro-establishment Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) brought up the idea of creating two landfill sites in the Greater Bay Area to build a "Hong Kong town" for new housing, mainly for Hong Kong residents, according to a copy of the motions and proposals obtained by the Global Times.

The first site for an outlying unit of Hong Kong enclosed in Zhuhai is a 30-minute drive from the Hong Kong International Airport and a mere five-minute drive from the Zhuhai and Macao ports. If the central government and HKSAR government reach an agreement, technological evaluation and landfill work could be completed within five years.

The other site, one of the major islands in Zhuhai, is geographically close to Hong Kong's commercial centers including Central and Tsim Sha Tsui.

If the project is approved, at least 10 square kilometers of undeveloped land could be developed at each site, and if the two sites are to serve residential needs, 160,000-200,000 units would be provided, doing much to address the city's housing issues, DAB, the city's largest pro-establishment party, envisioned.

The proposal, "based on varied research reports and surveys we have done in different compounds and among different social classes," reflects much of the public opinion, NPC deputy Chan Yung, vice-chairman of DAB and chairman of the New Territories Association of Societies, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

As for specifics of the project, such as the budgeted cost of creating the landfills and housing starts, who is supposed to foot the bill, the criterion for selecting contractors and developers, whether the new housing is public rental or commercial housing, and pricing homes to be offered, Chan said that will need to be worked out between the central government, the HKSAR government, Guangdong Province, and relevant cities.

The city continued at the top of global living rankings in 2019, with a local home costing $1.24 million on average, followed by Singapore reporting $874,372 as the average price of buying a home, according to results revealed annually by real estate firm CBRE.

The other three Chinese cities making the list were third-placed Shanghai, Shenzhen in fifth spot, and Beijing which was in ninth place.

A troubling economic picture in Hong Kong evidently renders home ownership a tougher decision for locals than their domestic peers.

Hong Kong's economy shrank 8.9 percent year-on-year in real terms in the first quarter, its biggest contraction since the first quarter of 1974 when quarterly numbers became available, official data showed. A plunge in local retail sales further dampened local market sentiment.

It's believed that the central government, after finalizing the national security legislation in Hong Kong, would help in addressing the issues of land and housing confronting the SAR, said Liang Haiming, chairman of Guangzhou-based China Silk Road iValley Research Institute.

Just as with Macao, which rented a piece of land on Hengqin island in Zhuhai where the University of Macau built a new campus, the possibility of Hong Kong leasing a parcel of land in the Greater Bay Area can't be ruled out, Liang told the Global Times.

Still, there are multiple concerns over the feasibility of the relocation plan that is theoretically intended to iron out housing woes.

With home prices also rising in the Pearl River Delta, it's now the case that "an inch of land is worth an ounce of gold," rendering it financially costly to designate sites within the delta to create landfills, said a Hong Kong resident giving his surname as Lee.

In Lee's view, eyeing the Greater Bay Area for new housing is not preferable to the city's own push to reclaim land for the building of artificial islands east of Lantau Island, although not much progress has been made on the program, he told the Global Times.

DAB's Chan said, however, that factoring in the city's current political atmosphere and the dilemma its Legislative Council is in, it's unknown when the artificial island project can be approved, just like the case with the city's Article 23 legislation. Article 23 of the Basic Law provides that the HKSAR government "shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against" the central government.

Just as the central government moves to introduce a national security law in the city, the deep-rooted structural issues with Hong Kong's development, notably housing and opportunities for local youth, also requires vigorous support from the central government, Chan suggested.

In fact, Chan's party has already taken into account the feasibility issue, with this year's proposal revised from the previous year's version which conjured up the idea of setting aside a portion of land in neighboring cities in Guangdong including Zhuhai, Zhongshan and Huizhou for new housing.

Chan reckoned that concerns over different legal systems and varying modes of residence community management, among other discrepancies, can be gradually addressed so long as everyone remains open-minded and integrates themselves into the national drive for the Greater Bay Area.

Describing DAB's proposal as a well-intentioned initiative aimed at tackling problems troubling locals and broadening opportunities, especially for youngsters, Tian Feilong, associate professor at the Law School of Beihang University in Beijing commented the landfill creation actually takes a detour rather than fundamentally debugging the local housing headache.

It's not the case that there's no land available for new housing, but instead the city's land supplies are subject to local developers' dominance in the local real estate market and the government's land controls, Tian, also a director of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies, told the Global Times, arguing against shifting the burden onto the Greater Bay Area.

As one of China's most important regional powerhouses, the Greater Bay Area is envisaged to become an innovation hub, meaning all of its components are tasked with their respective developmental goals, Tian noted.

In his words, housing for Hong Kong residents on leased land in the Greater Bay Area, even if materialized, wouldn't mean an area enclosed in a mainland city to be governed under an entirely different regime.

It ought to be the HKSAR government's responsibility to improve land controls and ensure public rental housing supplies, while "the Greater Bay Area is supposed to be a goldmine to attract Hong Kong's young people," who are striving to create a more prosperous future for the city, remarked the regional affairs observer.