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LAND AND HOUSING
Buildings. The capital expenditure on private building works undertaken in the Colony in the calendar year 1963 was approxi- mately $561 million. This record figure exceeds by $269 million the yearly average of expenditure in the previous three years. The noticeable tendency towards the construction of larger and taller buildings continues to be extended to the suburban and rural areas of the Colony. The Building Authority was confronted with a tremendous influx of applications during the middle of the year following the enactment of the Building (Planning) (Amendment) Regulations, 1962. The number of cases dealt with by the Tenancy Tribunal continued to increase and with it, inevitably, the number of submissions to be dealt with by the Building Authority.
The year followed the usual pattern in that most new buildings were designed for domestic occupancy; 84 per cent of all the new buildings completed were for residential use. As in previous years private developers still made the greatest contribution to the provision of living accommodation, whilst the Housing Authority and the Housing Society continued to make progress in the erec- tion of low-cost housing. The trend towards providing small tenement units in very large composite buildings continued and as units are usually sold on a monthly instalment basis they attracted much attention from the low income groups. Two large hotels in the Central area of Hong Kong and another in Tsim Sha Tsui were completed.
Factories and workshops still comprised the greater part of non- domestic buildings, although the demand for office buildings continued to be strong. A number of new office blocks were completed and occupied, with several others in various stages of construction. One feature worthy of note was that several multi- storey office buildings were designed to provide large department stores in the basement, ground and first floors, with restaurants, and sometimes staff mess halls, on one or two upper floors of the building. A large expenditure was attracted to building for public entertainment and several cinemas were completed and occupied and one was under construction in the city of Victoria. The development of schools, godowns, churches and chapels followed the steady level of previous years. In an attempt to meet the requirements of tourists travelling on ships to the Colony, a