rooms will be built to a larger grid which will enable initial allocations to be made at about 35 square feet for each adult, as with Government Low Cost Housing estates. Tenders for the first Mark VI blocks were let during the year.
64. By 31st March, 1969 the Public Works Department had designed and Hong Kong's building contractors had built 477 multi- storey blocks containing 221,581 rooms. The largest estate managed by the Resettlement Department is Tsz Wan Shan whose population at the end of the year was 123,908 people. This estate should be finished in early 1970 and will eventually house 163,000 people, while two other estates (Sau Mau Ping and Ham Tin) will have populations of 130,000 and 104,000 respectively. The twenty-third estate, at Pak Tin in north-west Kowloon, was opened at the end of the year.
65. An important development of the year was the commencement of a programme for installing water taps in each room in the 170 Mark III and early Mark IV blocks. Some 50,000 rooms are involved and the programme is estimated to cost about $5 million, which will be recovered by means of a small additional charge on the monthly rent. By the end of March work had been completed in 110 blocks.
POPULATION
66. At the end of the year, the total number of authorized persons living in the estates was 1,030,022, which represents an increase of 62,838 during the year. Appendix 1 shows the detailed figures and Appendix 10 the progressive rise through the years in graphic form. Appendix 5 also shows the population divided among the various existing Marks of blocks. It can be seen that slightly over half the tenants still live in the earlier Mark I and II blocks. The number of unauthorized residents in estates is not known precisely since they do not advertise their presence and are not easily discovered.
67. The department has always had some difficulty in maintaining a reasonable balance between the need to keep detailed statistics about its tenants in a form which would meet some of the needs of sociolog- ical researchers and the general public, while preserving the privacy of the tenants and enabling the staff to concentrate on their essential duties. There is, for example, little reliable overall information about the patterns of employment and incomes enjoyed by those who live in resettlement accommodation. A Hong Kong University survey of
24
Page 30Page 31