Speaker: Ruby YS LAI, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2025-26
Chair/Discussant: Ya-Wen Lei, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

In the past decades, the growing housing crisis has destabilized individual housing tenure and exacerbated an everyday sense of insecurity, especially among low-income renters in megacities, where housing costs continuously soar under increased financialization and commodification. How do individuals and families build a home while facing heightened precariousness? This talk argues that housing precarity is an outcome of inequality resulting from the macro political-economic structure rather than a condition of poverty, by focusing on one of the world’s most unaffordable housing markets, Hong Kong, and its infamous subdivided units, also called ‘butchered rooms’—a form of informal housing unit subdivided from an entire compartment, characterized by an extremely tiny size, with a median as small as 11m?. Drawing on years of ethnographic and participatory fieldwork and policy analysis, the talk first illustrates the homemaking strategies through which occupants of butchered rooms navigate the spatio-material constraints of their built environment and the processes of resilience building. The second part of the talk provides a critical analysis of the housing policy regime in Hong Kong during the post-1997 period and unravels the political-economic structures that necessitate the invisible labor of occupants that buffers the consequences of housing inequality resulting from the city’s neoliberal housing regime and developmental urban governance, which resonate with housing crises in urban areas across the globe.