Family Service Centre built 24 new cottages to provide housing for families previously living in unsatisfactory conditions and 6 wooden cottages on the reclamation were cleared to make way for a combined fire station and post office, the occupants being offered fresh sites in the same area for building new cottages, using brick with asbestos roofs, with financial aid from the Government.
CHAPTER 6
THE MULTI-STOREY ESTATES
59. Most of the 860,000 people (including accepted unauthorized persons) in accommodation administered by the Resettlement Depart- ment live in the multi-storey estates, mainly in urban Kowloon, but also in two districts of Hong Kong Island and in the New Territories. The origins of multi-storey resettlement housing go back only 12 years to 1954, when two and three-storey temporary buildings known as 'Bowring Bungalows' were built to house the victims of the disastrous squatter fire which occurred at Shek Kip Mei on Christmas Day 1953. Meanwhile, the Public Works Department planned and built taller buildings, eight being completed at Shek Kip Mei in the summer of 1954. The basic design was a six-storey block, H-shaped in plan, with sixty-four rooms on the long arms of the H on each floor, and two water standpipes, six communal flush latrines and a communal open space for washing clothes on the cross-piece. Access to rooms was by balconies running round the four sides of each wing on every floor, the buildings being entered by four staircases, one at each corner.
60. After these buildings were completed and occupied, they were subjected to careful scrutiny in order to determine what improvements in design should be made in the light of experience. Subsequent buildings were of seven storeys instead of six, and had flat roofs strengthened and fenced so that they might add to the recreational space. Another improvement was the provision of communal bathrooms on the scale of one to about 35 domestic rooms. A further modification was the conversion of a number of ground floor rooms into shops or workshops measuring 120 or 240 square fect in which those squatters who had shops or workshops before being resettled could continue in business. Some of the later blocks built from 1961 onwards also have shop spaces of 155 and 310 square feet. By March 1966, 6,537 ground floor rooms in all estates had been let as shops and 1,092 as workshops. Of the
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