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LAND AND HOUSING
be provided by the Mortgage Corporation formed at the end of the year with government support.
Hong Kong's resettlement estates have attracted world-wide attention. Hundreds of thousands of people are being provided with housing by a low-cost building programme which, for speed and imagination, has few if any parallels. By the end of 1964, the Govern- ment of Hong Kong had become, through this programme, the direct landlord of about 701,600 people or 19 per cent of the popula- tion and new programmes aim to provide space for 900,000 adults in the next six years. New blocks are being built at the rate roughly one every 10 days.
The resettlement programme was begun to cope with the housing problems created by the phenomenal growth in population since the war. Conventional housing was quite inadequate and new- comers therefore found homes by building shelters or huts of any materials, on any piece of vacant land. These squatter huts rapidly spread over the urban areas of Hong Kong and Kowloon. In many places there were colonies of squatters, some of 40,000 or more, living together in a closely-packed mass, with their own shops and schools, and even factories and workshops. Sanitation was primitive or non-existent; there were frequent fires and a constant threat of epidemic disease. Moreover, the presence of these squatters on the land made it impossible to solve the very problems to which their presence had given rise. The houses, schools and hospitals needed for this swollen population could not be put in hand because the land required for their construction was often occupied by squatters.
The first attempt to solve the squatter problem was made in 1948 when people occupying land in the centre of the city were moved to more outlying areas, which it was then thought would not need to be re-developed for some time. Later, ‘approved resettle- ment areas' were established where dwellings were required to be built of stone or other fire-proof materials to an approved pattern. The disadvantage was that these areas reproduced many of the unsatisfactory features of the squatter settlements while the majority of squatters were too poor to be able to build or purchase the type of cottage required. This difficulty was partly overcome by the construction of cottages by welfare organizations which rented them to approved settlers, either direct or through Government,