Hong Kong’s Shattered Idea of Home: Fire at Wang Fuk Court Recasts a City’s Public-Housing Memory

A deadly fire tore through Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po on Nov. 26, killing at least 160 people and turning a familiar cluster of towers into a scene of smoke and ruin. The tragedy arrived as the author, who left Hong Kong after the 2019 mass demonstrations to finish a novel in Taiwan, returned this year to visit family and confront the city’s enduring question: what does home mean in a place shaped by public housing and memory?

On that first afternoon back, the writer joined friends at a cha chaan teng for a late lunch and watched news feeds glow with flames licking the eight Wang Fuk Court towers. By then the blaze had largely been brought under control, but the images left behind a heavy sense of vulnerability in a city that has long defined itself through its housing blocks and neighborhoods. In the days that followed, the death toll rose as rescue crews continued to search and families waited for word of loved ones.

To understand the scale of the disaster and its emotional resonance, it helps to recall Hong Kong’s housing story. In the 1950s, after refugees from the mainland fled political turmoil, the city faced an acute housing shortage. The British colonial government began building resettlement blocks that would evolve into large rental estates. For low-income families, public housing offered modest comfort and a measure of stability. The writer’s own family spent the first five years of life in a public housing unit in Kowloon, where corridors wound around a central lightwell and neighbors could hear shouting, laughter, and cooking from multiple floors at once.

By the late 1970s, the government launched the Home Ownership Scheme to help families move from rental estates into subsidized flats. When residents vacated rental units, those with greater needs could move in, and over roughly a decade more than 200,000 families became HOS homeowners. Later, many households relocated to new towns in the New Territories, including Tseung Kwan O, where the writer’s parents secured a three-bedroom unit in the 1990s. In those neighborhoods—less than a stone’s throw from wet markets, cha chaan tengs, and gardens—the daily routine revolved around a compact radius: buy groceries, take the kids to school, see the doctor, visit a friend. Life felt secure in familiar rhythms even as the city continued to grow around it.

Five days after the fire, the writer returned to Wang Fuk Court to lay flowers for those who had perished. The neighborhood looked altered but not erased: shops remained open, schools were in session, and yet the air carried a heavier weight. Part of the community center was set aside for families to identify the dead, while another area housed a shelter where thin mattresses lay in rows and belongings were laid out in careful piles. In a nearby laundromat, the owner told reporters she had been calling her regular customers, many of them Wang Fuk Court residents, to check on them. Watching stacks of cleaned clothes through the glass, the writer pondered how some objects—clothes, tickets, receipts—might be all that remained of a life once lived.

Five decades of public housing in Hong Kong—from resettlement blocks to the Home Ownership Scheme to new towns in the New Territories—have shaped how generations imagine stability and belonging. The Wang Fuk Court tragedy underscores, anew, the fragile line between safety and loss in a city renowned for its dense housing and rapid change. For the author and many others who grew up in or near these estates, the fire is more than a single city incident; it is a rupture in a long, lived memory of what home can and cannot endure. The scene at Wang Fuk Court—flowers laid, shelters formed, clothes waiting in laundromats—will linger as part of a broader conversation about urban policy, memory, and the human need for a place to call home in Hong Kong and beyond.