CHAPTER III
CLEARANCE OPERATIONS UNDERTAKEN DURING THE YEAR TO FREE LAND FOR DEVELOPMENT
38. Using the techniques described in the previous chapter, the Mobile Resettlement Unit was able to clear and resettle a total of 50,200 squatters during the year 1955/56. Of this number 36,600 were cleared from land required for permanent development or about 74% of the total. The remaining 26% were squatters whose resettlement was required either as a result of squatter fires or in order to clear fire lanes through large squatter areas to reduce the extent of these fires. These percentages show a significant change from those for the previous year when only 15% of the squatters cleared were from land required for permanent development. In 1954/55 the amount of land freed for development was 24 acres; in 1955/56 it was 125 acres.
39. The Mobile Resettlement Unit's main task was there- fore the clearance of squatters from land required for development. Almost all these operations took place in the northern outskirts of Kowloon, where considerably more than half the Colony's squatters were to be found in a narrow belt of land which stretched for six miles from Lai Chi Kok in the west to Kun Tong in the east. At its peak, in 1953, this belt of land contained over 300,000 squatters, most of them living in illegal townships of up to 50,000 people. The public was only too familiar with the fire risk and the health hazard presented by these dense concentrations of squatters. What was not generally appreciated was that they had, by 1954, brought the natural expansion of Kowloon to a virtual full stop. They not only occupied several square miles of valuable land which was required urgently for development: they were also obstructing access to a great deal of additional land which was itself free of squatters; and they were holding up work on important new reclamations for industry and housing.
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