during the year in four resettlement areas. The remaining 49 cottages at Healthy Village have been cleared to make way for an extension to the Healthy Village Housing Society Estate and for Police Rank and File Quarters. This village is now no longer a resettlement area. At Tai Wo Hau 412 structures were cleared to provide a site for stage II of the Tai Wo Hau Resettlement Estate. In Man Wah Village in Ho Man Tin 803 huts were cleared to make way for the Valley Road Low Cost Housing Project; 227 cottages were cleared from Tai Hang Sai in order to provide a site for the construction of a multi-storey low cost housing estate by the Hong Kong Settlers' Housing Corporation. With the exception of a few families, all those cleared were offered alternative accommodation in the nearest convenient resettlement estates. At the end of the year clearance notices had been served on the occupants of 298 cottages and huts in Ho Man Tin in connexion with the widening of Nairn Road.
50. Settlers pay quarterly permit fees for the sites they occupy, the amount depending both on the size of the site and the situation of the area; for a typical site of 160 square feet the permit fee is $5 a quarter in outlying areas and $15 a quarter in the more central areas. If the permittee does not own the premises he is living in, he also pays rent of either $10 or $15 a month to Government or to a Welfare Agency or as a hire purchase instalment to a private owner.
51. On 31st March, 1962, there were 9,592 stone or brick cottages in resettlement areas, a decrease of 149 from the previous year. There were 3,513 wooden huts, a decrease of 1,295. There were also 74 factories and small workshops and 262 shops. The population of the cottage areas decreased by 7,863 during the year. Details of population are given in Appendix I at the end of this report.
CHAPTER V
THE MULTI-STOREY ESTATES
52. By the end of 1953 it had become clear that cottage resettlement was too slow and too wasteful of land to solve the squatter problem. In the event urgent action was forced on the Government by the Shek Kip Mei squatter fire on Christmas night, 1953 in which 53,000 people lost their homes and it was to provide for the victims of this fire that the first multi-storey resettlement blocks were designed. These were two- and three- storey buildings known as Bowring Bungalows which were constructed on the fire site to provide temporary homes for the
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