PUBLIC WORKS AND UTILITIES
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markets, latrines and bath-houses, parks and playgrounds and small office buildings and police stations.
Ninety eight Government buildings of various types were being designed; among these were seven primary schools, four secondary schools, six clinics, two fire stations and eight police stations. A large programme of works for housing Government officers was also in hand with two blocks of flats and one block of service flats providing an additional 194 quarters for senior officers, four sites providing a total of 1,000 quarters for the police rank and file and one block of 100 quarters for firemen.
Two important office blocks were being designed, both 20 storeys high, one in Kowloon providing general accommodation for the expanding Government departments in that area and the other at the Police Headquarters, Hong Kong, which will enable the police to centralize their accommodation at present scattered in various private offices in the city.
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Plans for a multi-storey car park for 1,300 cars were completed. This car park, to be built at the foot of the Kowloon Peninsula, will_serve Kowloon residents travelling by ferry to Hong Kong. Planned with eight storeys of ramped car parking, one storey of shops below and, as with the Murray Parade Ground car park, a telephone exchange above, it will help to solve the car parking problem in the ferry area and provide valuable information on the maximum reasonable capacity of car parks of this kind.
The building of resettlement blocks increased and 41 new blocks, each capable of accommodating over 2,000 people were con- structed. This represented a further 3,700,000 square feet of habitable floor area including space for shops, schools and welfare facilities. Shortage of land and length of time often required to clear sites of squatters and carry out site formation (and the fact that by settling perhaps 100,000 persons in an area, long-term problems arise in the provision of public services such as water supply), made it necessary to keep the programme of provision of future sites constantly under review. Sites which have been provi- sionally considered and reserved for development in the next five years will be adequate for about a half million persons.
The Government Low Cost Housing programme got under way with commencement of construction of the first estate at Kwun Tong. Planning was well advanced on many other sites and this