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LAND AND HOUSING
Individual rooms varied in size from just under 100 square feet to just over 300 square feet with the majority of 120 square feet designed to house a family of four or five adults. Twenty-four square feet for an adult was taken as the minimum requirement for health and comfort. With minor modifications, though with an improved external appearance, multi-storey resettlement accom- modation of this type had, by the end of 1963, been built to house 530,319 persons in 12 estates at a total capital cost of about $290 million.
Rooms were allocated according to the size of the family rather than the rent they could afford to ensure that economical use was made of the available space. Rents were fixed at the lowest possible level to cover reimbursement of the capital cost of the building over 40 years (at 3 per cent per annum compound interest) plus an element for management and land costs. The rent of a standard 120 square feet room was fixed at $14 a month. The percentage of rents which had to be written off in the financial year 1962-3 was only 0.019 per cent. No charge was made for the communal water supply but electricity, if it was installed at a tenant's request, was at his own expense; communal lighting was provided by Government.
Not all resettlement accommodation is of the same uniform standard. Some families in squatter areas lived in structures of a much higher standard than the average. To provide these people with better accommodation, self-contained flats with private balconies, kitchens, lavatories and showers were constructed in a number of blocks at a monthly rental of $45 a month for a flat of 240 square feet and $65 a month for one of 360 square feet. More recently the new H-blocks have been modified to provide larger rooms on the ends of each floor with private balconies and their own water supply. These rooms are let at a rent of $45 a month to families cleared from better than average structures.
A new design, which is similar to that of the low-cost housing designed and built by the Public Works Department and adminis- tered by the Hong Kong Housing Authority, is now under construction at Kwai Chung in the New Territories, where the completion of the first six blocks was expected early in 1964. The new blocks, of both eight and 16 storey construction, differ fundamentally from the previous design in that access to the