REVIEW
31
at. Several additions have been made to the University of Hong Kong, partly through Government subsidy and partly through the munificence of benefactors. A new six-storey Technical College, with outlying laboratories and work- shops, in which the Colony's industrial and commercial houses shared with the Government the cost of building and equipment, was opened in 1957. Work will shortly start on the site for a new 1,300-bed General Hospital in Kowloon which will be one of the biggest of its kind in the British Commonwealth.
ار
The plan of assault launched in 1954 against Hong Kong's problem of housing for the masses is an endless campaign; no easy victory is possible, for as soon as one difficulty has been surmounted, another reveals itself. Al- ready the Government has spent, or is committed to spending, more than $200,000,000 on low-cost housing and resettlement estates, and it is estimated that an annual expenditure of $100,000,000 on all forms of domestic build- ing may be necessary to keep pace with Hong Kong's relentlessly increasing population. Meanwhile the building of multi-storey resettlement blocks and low-cost housing estates continues apace. By the end of 1957 some 137,000 people were living in the H-blocks already described, and the construction of yet another great resettlement estate, which when completed will house more than 60,000 people, had commenced. (Incidentally, the experiment of building a five-storey H-block to be rented exclusively to former squatter workshops and factories has proved a success.)
Although the northern perimeter of Kowloon is becoming an almost solid phalanx of H-block resettlement estates, and although the mass of the North Point low-cost housing estate now looms on the shore of the Island, there are still thousands living in shanty towns and on rooftops. There is, however, a clear difference between the situation today and that of 1953; the effect of the decisions taken in 1954 has been to reduce the areas of brown, shapeless, insanitary huts