[ESSAY] “1331 Runway: Hong Kong Youth Utopia or Real-Estate Planning Malfunction?” by Daniel Gauss

In July 2025, international media erupted with enthusiasm over a project in Hong Kong called 1331 Runway. Built on land once occupied by the former Kai Tak Airport, the development promised a bold act of recycling: thousands of prefabricated quarantine units, constructed at speed during the COVID 19 pandemic, redeveloped into a dense, hyper modern housing complex.

After the pandemic, these government built isolation blocks sat unused, a physical reminder of a crisis that had been addressed and had passed. Eventually, a company stepped forward with a proposal. They would take over the units, repurpose them, and transform the site into a youth oriented cultural village.

I think the local government recognised that the units were located far from the city centre, which made them suitable for quarantine facilities. However, I believe the authorities were reluctant to pursue further development of the 3,000 units because their distance from the city’s most vital areas posed serious transportation challenges. When that company approached with an experimental proposal to attract and house young people as part of Hong Kong’s cultural future, the idea appeared favourable, and 1331 Runway was born. I suspect that there were few alternative options under consideration.

The idea was marketed as visionary: an affordable, vibrant enclave for young people, complete with art spaces, performances, and clubs, all for roughly $25 a day. Even the BBC ran a glowing promotional piece. Optimism ran so high that residents were to be limited to a five year stay, implying overwhelming demand and inevitable turnover.

Less than six months later, the reality of 1331 Runway looks far less utopian.

At present, roughly 250 units appear to be available, not as long term youth housing, but as short term hostel rooms, marketed through platforms such as Hotels and Booking. On paper, this might look like success: rooms are often fully booked, and availability can be scarce. Yet a closer look at guest reviews reveals a very different story.

The most common refrain is not praise for visionary urban planning, but relief, relief that, in a city with notoriously expensive hotels, there is at least one place that is cheap, even if deeply flawed. Many comments read like a badge of endurance: the place is rough, but affordable, and guests present themselves as tough enough to endure it.

The complaints are strikingly consistent. 1331 Runway is far from the city centre, disconnected from daily urban life. Taxi and Uber drivers reportedly struggle to locate it, even with GPS. There is no proper laundry service. There is no real food infrastructure nearby, only a handful of vending machines selling dried noodles.

For anyone who wants to eat, work, or participate in city life, a shuttle bus is essential. That shuttle runs every thirty minutes beginning at 7:30 a.m., stops entirely at 11:30 a.m., resumes at 2 p.m., and ends at 8 p.m. Miss it, and you are effectively stranded unless you can find a bus that goes nearby or persuade a taxi driver to attempt the journey.

Reading between the lines of these reviews, one gets the impression that 1331 Runway appeals mainly to hardened travellers accustomed to inconvenience and austerity. Some even express gratitude, not because the experience is good, but because alternatives in Hong Kong are unaffordable. This is not the profile of young graduates flocking to a dynamic creative hub.

This raises a fundamental question: does anyone seriously believe that 3,000 young people can be packed into these units and expected to live full, productive lives? That they will all board shuttle buses each morning to go to work and return obediently each night before 8 p.m.? That laundry, food access, and basic daily needs are optional, to be replaced by rock music, art galleries, and vague promises of “vibrancy”? The idea borders on the absurd.

To me, 1331 Runway is little more than cage apartments rebranded for youth. The language is softer, the marketing glossier, but the logic is the same: minimal space, minimal services, maximum density, and an underlying profit motive disguised as social innovation. It is difficult not to find this disturbing.

Hong Kong is infamous for its cage apartments, cramped, inhumane living spaces occupied largely by older, poor men who have been failed by the housing system. The city has thousands of such residents, men who have slipped through every social safety net.

Given that the government already owned these quarantine units, and may still own them, could there be serious discussion of allocating even a portion of them to people in genuine need? Even 1,000 units could transform 1,000 lives. Right now, 2,500 units are not being used.

Two years of stable, dignified housing, free of charge, could be a humane and forward looking gesture, and a relatively modest one in the context of Hong Kong’s resources. There would have to be work involved, of course. The new residents would need laundry facilities. More obvious bus lines might have to be run to the nearest subway.

Some type of food infrastructure might be established. If they can make money, restaurants and grocery stores will, however, appear for the 1,000 new residents. Residents might be offered a basic income or assisted in job training or in finding employment. Is it not worth a try? Hong Kong’s forgotten men sleep in wire boxes; its youth are invited to dance in recycled quarantine pods.

More than anything, 1331 Runway depresses me. It exposes a mindset in which real estate planning is driven less by human need than by optics and profit. Thousands of units sit underused, while suffering continues elsewhere in the city. A plan that was unlikely to work from the outset was promoted enthusiastically by international media, lending legitimacy to what is now little more than a low grade hostel on the city’s margins. The residents are not inspired; they are merely too poor to go elsewhere.

1331 Runway is not a youth utopia. It is a missed opportunity, but one that can still be corrected and serve as inspiration for future endeavours to help Hong Kong’s neediest.

^{How to cite: Gauss, Daniel. “1331 Runway: Hong Kong Youth Utopia or Real-Estate Planning Malfunction.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 21 Dec. 2025, chajournal.com/2025/12/21/runway.}

Daniel Gauss was born in Chicago and studied at UW–Madison and Columbia University. He has worked in the field of education for over twenty years and has published non-fiction in 3 Quarks Daily, The Good Men Project, Daily Philosophy and E: The Environmental Magazine, among other platforms. He has also published fiction and poetry. Daniel currently lives and teaches in China. See his writing portfolio for more information. [All contributions by Daniel Gauss.]