Background
The Plover Cove Reservoir, located in the Pat Sin Leng and Plover Cove Country Park, is the second largest reservoir in Hong Kong. It is also the first 'reservoir in the sea' over the world.
The massive construction work of the reservoir is a project that had never been attempted anywhere in the world. Engineers dammed the inlet, pumped out the sea water and filled it with fresh water.
Construction work commenced in 1960 and was completed in 1968, providing a capacity of 170 million cubic metres. Work on raising the height of the dams began in 1970. Upon completion in 1973, the reservoir capacity was increased to 230 million cubic metres.
The dam of the Plover Cove Reservoir, which is approximately 2 kilometres long, was built by layers of sand and gravel. The reservoir site was once famous for pearl production in ancient time, but later continuous pearling resulted in a fall in production. It is now a natural fishpond with many species bred.
Problem To Be Solved
Land Supply
Water Resources
Economic Development
Is Hong Kong really short of land supply?
During the 1970 to 1980s, the Government launched a huge new town programme to deal with the rapid population growth. In just 20 years, nine new towns were established (see Table 1). At present, the total population of these nine new towns is about 3.47 million, and is expected to reach 3.63 million by 2021. Among these new towns, only Tung Chung will expand further to accommodate another 144,000 people. Therefore these new towns, in view of their soon saturation, will certainly be unable to quench the severe housing shortage problem currently confronting Hong Kong society. Moreover, the current development only includes smaller new areas, which would be unhelpful to the housing shortage problem. Also, the slow planning and development approval process exacerbate the problem. The situation now is a long term under-supply of developable sites and expected continual rise in private property prices beyond reach of the ordinary people.
An adequate land reserve needs to be identified for adequate long term land supply to keep property prices at reasonable levels. An analogy can be drawn by considering the Linked Exchange rate: If Hong Kong does not have a foreign reserve of several hundreds of billions (USD), it will be difficult to keep a stable linked exchange rate. Therefore the key to the Hong Kong property price is not just an announced target supply for the next year, but also the existence of a known and feasible long term land reserve. Land-prices have led to many social problems in Hong Kong, including difficulties for family formation due to costly home purchase; social disparity, lack of upward mobility channel for the younger generation, people becoming “flat slaves”, shrinking of industries and businesses, etc. The solution to most of these problems lies in an effective policy of stabilizing property prices through assuring abundant long term land supply.
