73
4
: great extent in this City and my reasons are as follows:-
We had last year 7,042 Chinese dwellings with 18,800 floors in the City and the Chinese population of the City was 164,250; This works out a little over 8.5 persons per house or about 8 persons per floor and there are very few Chinese floors so small that they will not legally accommodate 8 persons, while many will accommodate 3 and 4 times that number. As a further argument in support of my contention I may add that in 1888 a Committee was appointed consisting of Mr. Mitchell Innes and Mr. N. J. Ede, to report fully on the question of overcrowding in houses in the City of Victoria, and after a most elaborate and complete enquiry extending over nearly two years, they reported that 745 houses in the City out of a total of 6,854 houses were overcrowded, this overcrowding amounting to the fact that 107 persons occupied the space legally allowable to 100 persons. This was before any regulations for the prevention of overcrowding in common lodging houses, opium divans, and matsheds had been adopted by the Board and the legislature, and I claim therefore, from these figures and from our periodical inspections, that what overcrowding does exist in the City is to be found almost entirely in such buildings. There is however the far more serious question of the overcrowding of domestic dwellings, or surface crowding which exists to such an alarming extent in this City.
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This 申报 surface crowding