REVIEW
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buildings were insisted upon. Presently it was seen that this form of resettlement was uneconomic both in land and money and could not be used on a scale which would make a real impact on the squatter or housing problem as a whole. But in those days few thought of the problem as one which was permanent, for most believed that once conditions settled in China the bulk of the immigrants would return to their homeland as they had in the past, leaving post-war redevelopment and the newly constructed build- ings to solve most of our own housing problems. A squatter fire which occurred in December 1953, and which made 53,000 people homeless, brought things to a head, principally by providing a vacant site for more intensive development. A Resettlement Depart- ment was set up to co-ordinate the duties of squatter control and clearance and the government then undertook to rehouse the majority of the squatters in multi-storey buildings at rents which they could afford. By 1956, 203,000 had become government tenants in multi-storey estates and cottage areas.
But not everybody in urgent need of new accommodation was a squatter. The conventional housing needs of the Colony, already desperately serious before the immigrants came, also demanded attention. A survey of 267,000 households in the urban area under- taken in 1956 showed that 79 per cent of all households shared the accommodation they occupied, 95,000 households were living in cubicles, 43,000 in bed-spaces, 8,000 in cock-lofts, and 4,000 on verandahs. Only 20,400 households had accommodation which included a living room, not used for sleeping.
In 1954 the Housing Authority was created to augment the efforts of the Housing Society which had been founded in 1948. Both sought to alleviate the problem of housing for white collar workers. The Special Committee on Housing, which reported in 1956, recom- mended various measures aiming at the eventual provision of sufficient housing to ensure that each person had at least 35 square feet of habitable floor area, and suggested a 10-year programme to build sufficient accommodation for the 750,000 people then thought to require re-housing. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people continued to live herded together in insanitary conditions, as many as 80 persons sharing a kitchen, a tap and a latrine. In squatter areas there were often no taps and no latrines.