Hong Kong boosts land supply to cool property market

HONG KONG, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Embattled new Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying said in his maiden policy speech on Wednesday that subsidised and public housing supply would be bolstered in an effort to address the city's red-hot property market.

Leung will be hoping the populist policy will help salvage his battered reputation and shore up his political future after several scandals, mass protests, and a failed impeachment in his first six months in office.

Hong Kong's sky-high property prices, some of the world's highest, have seen the re-emergence of cage homes, wire mesh hutches stacked on top of each other and cubicle apartments as the city's residents are forced out of the property market.

Leung said more land would be rezoned for housing and new areas opened up for development, with some 67,000 private units expected to come onto the market in the next three to four years, and a target of some 100,000 subsidised public housing units to be built in the five years from 2018.

(Reporting by James Pomfret and Christina Lo; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree and Michael Perry)