Hong Kong’s Shattered Idea of Home After Wang Fuk Court Fire

On Nov. 26, a deadly fire tore through Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, Hong Kong, killing at least 160 residents, home aides, and building workers and leaving a city to confront what home means in a place where housing policy is woven into daily life. A writer who spent his twenties moving between the New Territories and downtown Hong Kong, and who grew up in a public housing unit, found himself revisiting memories of a landscape defined by towers, markets, and the routines of everyday life as flames raged overhead and the rescue effort unfolded. By the time he arrived back in Hong Kong, the fire had largely been brought under control, but the images of towering flames and smoke remained fresh on social feeds and news sites as friends gathered at a cha chaan teng for late lunch, trying to make sense of a neighborhood that had long felt both familiar and fragile.

Eight towers rose on the site known as Wang Fuk Court, part of Tai Po New Town’s grid of low-rise shopping areas, a clinic, a wet market, and a network of communal spaces where daily life revolved around predictable rhythms. The haunting skyline and the memory of a town where people moved through a shared radius—grocery runs, school drop-offs, and friendly encounters at the corner bakery—became a stark backdrop to the tragedy. Visitors and residents spoke in hushed tones about the survivors and the missing, the temporary shelters, and the makeshift spaces that had to serve as a community center for grief and identification in the days after the blaze. ""

The fire’s scale punctuated a longer history of housing in Hong Kong, where the need for shelter has repeatedly collided with policy choices about who gets to own, rent, or upgrade a home. In the 1950s, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese mainlanders fled political upheaval seeking refuge in Hong Kong, the city faced a severe housing shortage. The British colonial government launched resettlement communities that would become the earliest public housing estates. For decades, these estates provided a modicum of stability for low-income families, even as living conditions were tightly linked to the social and economic policies of the time. The writer recalls his own childhood in Kowloon, in a public rental estate where corridors wrapped around a central lightwell, and a child’s voice could carry to neighbors on multiple floors—a daily theater of family life, its joys and tensions spilling into shared spaces.

By the late 1970s, the government broadened policy with the Home Ownership Scheme (HOS), which offered subsidized flats so families could move from rental units to ownership. The shift carried practical changes and deeper meaning: owning a home offered not just pride but the prospect of stability and a future to pass down. In the following decade, more than 200,000 families became HOS homeowners, a statistic that underscored a broader aspiration within a city long defined by housing scarcity. Wang Fuk Court, completed in 1983, would become home to thousands who moved from rental estates to an HOS apartment, a transition many described as a lottery win that reshaped their lives—from paying rent to furnishing a home with the expectation of long-term tenure.

For the writer, the arc of public housing and ownership was more than policy; it was memory itself. In the 1990s, his parents secured a three-bedroom HOS unit in Tseung Kwan O, in the New Territories, where life was still anchored in a compact radius of daily routines: a neighborhood shopping area, a cha chaan teng, a wet market, and a small community center where neighbors watched out for one another. The walls may have been thin, but the sense of continuity—the ability to walk for groceries, to see a doctor, to watch children play in a shared space—defined home as much by community as by four walls.

Five days after the fire, the writer laid flowers at Wang Fuk Court, and the ritual of mourning became intertwined with the region’s ordinary cadence of life. In the immediate aftermath, some elements of normal daily life persisted: shops remained open, schools continued, and residents returned to their routines even as the tragedy persisted in the collective memory. A portion of the community center was repurposed for families to identify the dead, while another area became a shelter filled with thin mattresses and the belongings of those displaced. In a nearby laundromat, the owner—whose regular customers included many Wang Fuk Court residents—made quiet phone calls to check on people she had come to know through the years. Through the window, stacks of clean clothes offered a subdued, almost ordinary counterpoint to the extraordinary disruption unfolding around them. For some survivors, those folded garments will remain a symbol of a life before the fire, tucked away with claim tickets that may never be redeemed.

The Wang Fuk Court tragedy invites a broader reflection on Hong Kong’s housing story. Public housing and ownership programs were designed as a social contract against a backdrop of pressure to urbanize, industrialize, and standardize a rapidly growing city. The eight towers of Wang Fuk Court, built in the early days of the estate system, stood as a physical reminder of how citizens once welcomed the promise of stability through policy—even as the towers themselves carried the burdens of crowded corridors, close proximity, and the shared life that comes with communal housing. The fire — a modern disaster that cut across lines of age, occupation, and socioeconomic status — exposed vulnerabilities that policy alone cannot fully address: the emotional stakes tied to the idea of home, and the ways in which memory, space, and community intersect in times of crisis.

For historians and residents alike, the incident reframes what it means to live in a city that has long used housing policy as a measure of social progress. The late-20th-century shift from rental to ownership reflects a broader tolerance for owning, managing, and transferring property within a population that has historically faced scarcity. Yet the trauma of Wang Fuk Court underscores that ownership does not erase risk, nor does it guarantee security against fires, structural failures, or the slow burn of aging public infrastructure. In the days after the tragedy, the neighborhood’s resilience was visible in small ways: the reopening of shops, the continuing presence of children at schools, and the quiet acts of neighbors looking out for one another amid the grief. The memory of the eight Wang Fuk Court towers now sits alongside the broader narrative of public housing in Hong Kong: a story of aspiration, displacement, and the fragile line between memory and everyday life.

As the city continues to confront the consequences of the blaze, the writer’s reflections return to a single, persistent question: how does a city cultivate a sense of home for people who are repeatedly asked to build it within the constraints of limited land, rising rents, and evolving policy? The answer, for now, remains a work in progress, rooted in the memories of those who lived through public housing’s early days, shaped by the generations who moved from rental estates to ownership, and tested by tragedies that reveal how thin the veil can be between safety and vulnerability. In the end, the hope is that memory—collective and individual—will inform future decisions about housing policy, community support, and the kinds of spaces a city must protect to keep the idea of home from becoming merely a footprint on a map.