Lam, Hong Kong's first female leader, took office promising to heal divisions and tackle livelihood issues, especially a housing crisis.

Her term was instead dominated by massive pro-democracy protests and Beijing's subsequent crackdown, as well as a zero-COVID pandemic strategy that kept the city isolated while its rivals reopened.

She is on track to depart at the end of June with the lowest approval rating of any leader since the 1997 handover from the United Kingdom.

In her final policy address in October 2021, Lam described Hong Kong as "much stronger than ever" after China intervened to ensure stability.

Her government survived the mass protests, but many say she failed to deliver on her life improvement pledges, which even the Chinese leadership says are at the heart of the city's "deep-rooted social conflicts".

Last year, 1.65 million Hong Kongers, or nearly one in four people, were living below the official poverty line of HK$4,400 (US$560) a month for a one-person household, the highest level since records began 12 years ago.

"The grass roots have been very neglected," said Sze Lai-shan, deputy director of the Society for Community Organization. "Sometimes it feels like [the government] is living on a different planet."

Even pro-establishment figures have been unimpressed.

"You may say [Lam] has been working very hard, but little has been achieved in solving the deteriorating livelihood issues and Hong Kong's deep-rooted conflicts," senior Beijing advisor Lau Siu-kai told AFP.

World's most expensive property

In July 2021, China's top official on Hong Kong affairs, Xia Baolong, gave a speech widely seen as a reflection of Beijing's growing impatience with the housing crisis, something every leader since 1997 has failed to solve.

The city, Xia said, must "say goodbye" to cage homes and the tiny, shared apartment rooms in which some 220,000 Hong Kongers still dwell.

Hong Kong has long held the title of the most unaffordable housing market in the world, and a study this year showed the city’s median property price is 23 times the median household income.

Lam increased the public housing supply more than her predecessors, but demand still outstripped supply while the wait time increased to six years.

Chan Kim-ching, a land-use researcher at the Liber Research Community, said Lam overly prioritized building apartments to buy.

"By putting home ownership as the goal, it exacerbated the wealth inequality in society," Chan told AFP. "[Lam's] policies do not target those in the greatest need. There is a mismatch."

Exodus

The last two years of Lam's term also witnessed a historic outflow of people fleeing either the political crackdown or some of the world's strictest pandemic controls.

The departures surged higher this year when Hong Kong's zero-COVID policy collapsed as the more transmissible Omicron variant broke through, killing more than 9,000 people, mostly the under-vaccinated elderly.

A net 160,000 people departed the territory in the first three months of 2022, and the Hong Kong diaspora is steadily growing in places like Canada, the UK and the United States.

Lam recently acknowledged that the pandemic curbs had caused a brain drain among foreign businesses, saying it was an "undeniable fact".

Meanwhile, Beijing's ongoing efforts to reshape Hong Kong's political landscape sparked another emigration wave.

After the 2019 protests were crushed, China imposed the sweeping national security law that criminalized dissent and transformed the once outspoken city.

Police arrested 182 people under the new law, and most of the city's prominent democracy activists are either in jail or have fled overseas.

Hong Kong plummeted from 80th to 148th place in Reporters Without Borders’ annual World Press Freedom Index, released this week.

Frances Hui, an activist granted asylum in the United States, described Lam as an "obedient enforcer" of Chinese President Xi Jinping's agenda.

"She accelerated the suppression of freedoms," Hui told AFP.