The disappearance of community, work and everyday life in late capitalism: Private housing advertisements from 1961 to 2011 in global Hong Kong

Hong Kong has one of the least affordable housing markets in the world, but little is
known about its housing advertisements, which constitute important discourses that
shape the cultural ideal of homeownership. In many ways, Hong Kong’s property market
represents that of other ‘global cities’, which are important nodes of global culture and
capital flows. How do private property developers market housing in this context,
where the nature of housing has developed from accommodation to investment/speculation?
What can housing advertisements tell us about the nature of housing consumption,
the role of the state and housing developers in a global city like Hong Kong? Using
both content and textual analyses, this article presents findings from a longitudinal study
of Hong Kong’s private housing newspaper advertisements between 1961 and 2011 and
examines how and why representations of the ideal home have changed. Unlike the
existing literature on housing advertisements which are mostly ideological critiques or
socio-historical accounts of housing advertisements in consumer capitalism, our analysis
utilises insights from Baudrillard’s political economy of the sign and Lipovetsky’s concept
of hypermodernity. Our contextual and longitudinal analysis contributes to the existing literature by integrating temporality with the three modalities of housing consumption,
that is, as living space, investment and financial speculation. We argue that from the late
1970s onwards, Hong Kong government policy actively promotes homeownership and a
housing hierarchy discourse, as housing advertisements changed from emphasising functionalities
and everyday living in 1961–1981, to privatised quality living in 1991–2001,
and abstract living and ‘hyperindividualistic’ political subjectivity in 2011. By demonstrating
the increased abstraction of living, the promotion of the hyperreal, and private
housing as objects of financial speculation as evidenced in the construction of ideal
homes, we illuminate key features of and inequalities associated with housing advertisements
in a global city in neoliberal, late capitalism.