in fact relatively few tenancies are terminated for arrears of rent. Out of a total of over $43 million due in rents for the year under review, only $9,916.25 (about 0.025%) had to be written off as irrecoverable
arrears.
76. Apart from tenancy control, one of the major problems is overcrowding. When rooms are allocated at a density approaching 24 square feet for each adult person in a household (two children under the age of ten count as one adult), overcrowding will obviously occur after a few years, taking into account the normal expansion of any family from births and the addition of close relatives. In Hong Kong, additions from the latter category are more numerous than they would be in most communities, since on their first arrival from China many families are split, wives, husbands or children having been left behind. These people frequently arrive in Hong Kong years after the other members of their family who by this time, through the operation of the clearance programme, may have become tenants in resettlement estates. The department can hardly refuse entry to these dependants though they swell very considerably the total population of the estates. Obviously management policy must be sufficiently flexible to take these special circumstances into account and must include a programme to relieve overcrowding in resettlement rooms. This year a programme for providing additional accommodation for 17,000 overcrowded persons was drawn up. Previously, relief of overcrowding took place only when accommodation became available after the demands of the clearance programme had been met. The number of people moved to relieve overcrowding during the year was 18,972 compared with 16,708 in 1964-1965. The relief programme is carefully designed to avoid taking too large a share of new resettlement rooms, since this category is only the fifth priority for such accommodation in the White Paper (see para. 8). At present, the programme operates only where the density in an overcrowded resettlement room reaches 16 sq. ft. per adult. Even so, many overcrowded families decline offers of larger rooms in more distant new estates, preferring discomfort to the severance of local ties; they generally prefer not to move far away from their place of employ- ment and from the schools in which their children are being educated.
77. The control of hawkers in resettlement estates, and to a lesser extent in cottage and factory areas, presents serious difficulties resulting in the sale of food under unhygienic conditions, difficulty in cleansing hawker areas, damage to ground surfaces and other Government
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