REVIEW
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take place in buildings of six or seven storeys. At this rate of development the Tai Hang Tung area could resettle 35% more people than it held before the fire, while two-storey development after the Shek Kip Mei fire was sufficient only for the original residents. This decision put the final seal on Government's strange new role of financier, contractor and landlord to a potential 20% of the population, for, with the concept of multi-storey buildings at a rent which resettled squatters could afford to pay, the last hope of interesting private capital vanished.
It may be of interest to the reader to have at this stage some description of these multi-storey blocks which from now on absorbed the main stream of resettlement. The basic design chosen was a six-storey block, H-shaped in plan. The long arms of the H consisted on each floor of sixty-four rooms and the cross-piece contained two water standpipes, six communal flush latrines and a communal open space for washing clothes. Each room was 120 square feet in area and access was by a balcony running completely round each long arm of the H. There were four staircases, one at each corner of the building. The average density of resettlement was five adults to a room (a child of ten years or under counting as half an adult) and smaller families were required to share a room; so that each building housed rather under 2,000 adults or well over 2,000 persons. The allowance of 24 square feet to an adult represented a considerable degree of overcrowding by normal standards, but this was emergency accommoda- tion; it was sanitary, weather-proof and fire-proof, and it was more realistic to judge it by what it replaced rather than by arbitrary standards of what was desirable.
In spite of continuing study and scrutiny, the blocks (which are still being built today) have undergone surprising- ly little change from this early prototype. Buildings are now usually of seven storeys instead of six, and they have flat roofs, strengthened and fenced so as to add to the space for recreation. Communal bathing rooms, on a scale of one to
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