Survivors of the Deadly Hong Kong Fire Are in Limbo

More than a week after a fire tore through a Hong Kong housing complex, killing 159 people, the city is confronting its biggest challenge yet. It must find homes for the thousands of residents who survived with little more than the clothes on their backs.
The government is already facing questions over its role in the worst tragedy to befall the city in seven decades. Now, survivors of the deadly fire are looking to the government to help them start over in one of the world’s most expensive and unequal places to live, where the average living space is smaller than a one-car garage.
The residential towers in Wang Fuk Court were home to more than 4,900 residents, many of them from working-class families who bought their subsidized homes through a government program and had lived there for decades before the raging fire took the lives of their loved ones and reduced their belongings to ash.
“It was horrible — all of our belongings are gone,” said Diana Yu, 71, who lived with her 43-year-old son in a two-bedroom apartment. She watched in tears as flames engulfed the sixth-floor unit where she had lived for four decades, her two cats trapped inside. Ms. Yu will stay in a small room in a former Covid-19 quarantine facility, but she said she did not know for how long.