232
A J BRADBROOK
HKLJ (1971)
housing project. Tenants, made to feel insecure, begin to distrust each other as well as project officials. Any sense of community within the project atrophies; families keep to their units or form small antagonistic cliques. Development of community life suffers further from housing authorities' thinly-masked opposition to tenant organizations and those who attempt to form them.'45
A second reason for reform is that in view of the wide legal powers granted by the common law to all landlords, the present wide discretionary powers exercised by the Authority would seem totally unnecessary. As was stated recently in relation to one- sided forms of tenancy agreement used in many public housing estates in the United States:
'One is prompted to ask whether it is really necessary for a housing authority, which has nine-tenths of the law on its side to begin with, to have the legal equivalent of a Sherman tank to protect it against a destitute and defenceless tenant.46
The final and perhaps most important argument in favour of reform is that the existence of wide discretionary powers in the Authority or any similar body is inherently undesirable. As Freund puts it:
•
'Discretionary administrative power over individual rights is undesirable per se, and should be avoided as far as may be, for discretion is unstandardized power and to lodge in an official such power over person or property is hardly conformable to the "Rule of Law." "47
APPENDIX 1
Housing Authority Domestic Tenancy Agreement
day of
THIS AGREEMENT is made the
One thousand nine hundred and
BETWEEN THE HONG KONG HOUSING AUTHORITY of 101, Princess Margaret Road, Kowloon in the Colony of Hong Kong (hereinafter called "the Landlord") of the one part AND
(Application No
( of
(hereinafter called "the
Tenant") of the other part WHEREBY IT IS AGREED as follows:
45 See (1968) 77 Yale LJ 988, 991.
),
National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, Public Housing is the Tenants (1967) 34, referred to in Toohey, Note (1968) 53 Cornell LR 1122, 1133, n 81.
"Vinson v Greenburgh Housing Authority (1968) 288 NYS 2d 159, 167, quoting from Freund, 'Historical Surveys' in Growth of American Administrative Law (1923) 22-3.