Redevelopment incentives and urban transformation in Hong Kong

Abstract

With the aging of building stocks worldwide, redevelopment has become an effective tool to optimize urban land use efficiency in high-density cities. However, the engagement of private developers in redevelopment processes is largely constrained by insufficient incentives due to private market imperfections and public frictions, impeding the economies of urban transformation. Leveraging Hong Kong as a highly relevant case study, this thesis investigates how to incentivize redevelopment to promote urban transformation in three research studies. The first research investigates the role of eminent domain and density regulation in incentivizing the redevelopment of multi-family buildings. With ownership dispersed vertically, the prerequisite consolidation is hampered by negotiation frictions and density restrictions, resulting in weak incentives in the private sector. Theoretically, this study documents that eminent domain and density regulation modify the option value of redevelopment and generate positive extensive and intensive margin effects on redevelopment probability. Empirically, this study utilizes a regression discontinuity design using building-age-based threshold reduction to assess the impacts of eminent domain. The finding reveals that a reduction in the threshold for eminent domain from 90% to 80% increases redevelopment probability by 2%. A spatial regression discontinuity design using area-based relaxation is conducted to assess the impacts of density regulation, suggesting that a 20% density relaxation leads to a 9% increase in redevelopment probability. The second research unveils the role of lot shape complexity and land use variance in land assembly to accommodate mixed-use potential in joint redevelopment of lots. With land parcels dispersed horizontally, land assembly is hindered by spatial frictions incurred by the delineation of property rights and planning use. Theoretically, this study documents that lot shape complexity and land use variance affect holdouts in land assembly through adjusting demands for complementarity. Empirically, this study unveils the fragmentation of urban morphology resulting from geographical and planning barriers. Further exploiting these exogenous determinants as instruments for land boundaries, the findings reveal that lot shape complexity results in a 0.2%–0.8% decrease in land assembly probability, along with reduced scale, prolonged duration, and inflated cost, which is driven by explicit cost from spatial frictions and implicit cost from ambiguous property rights. Land use variance, despite incurring delays in planning approvals, promotes the land assembly probability by 1.8%–4.0% through explicit benefit from the variance premium and implicit benefit from shape complementarity. The final research explores the impact mechanism of the redevelopment process on price gradient and spatial structure to facilitate urban transformation. Using quasi-random assignment of redevelopment incentives rooted in building-age-based eminent domain, this study employs a shift-share instrument that capitalizes community-level geographic variation in building age composition, combined with granular spatiotemporal data to isolate intra-city effects. The finding reveals that redevelopment leads to a spatial leveling of price gradients: rental prices flatten by 10.7%–16.2%, property transactions by 4.9%–12.1%, and land leases by 35.7%–39.3%. This leveling reshapes urban structure through enhanced business agglomeration and increased job opportunities, generating positive economic spillovers without evidence of displacement-driven outcomes. Notably, while agglomeration intensifies, demographic spillovers embedded in gentrification and segregation effects are limited, suggesting that these gains are achieved without incurring the typical costs associated with redevelopment.