6
I
But for commercial rents the Authority very properly aims to charge the full market value for its properties. There is no reason in the world why shopkeepers and other businessmen should expect to enjoy subsidised rents for shop premises and the like. They naturally expect to charge the market price for their goods, and will always do so, even if they paid no rent; a subsidy in this situation is thus out of the question and it is of course a condition of the shop tenancy agreement, which normally runs for three years, that the Authority is free to revise the rent when the tenancy period expires.
Then there is the Operations Committee which oversees the Housing Department's work on the control of squatting and the clearance of squatters, and along with the Management Committee it determines annual quotas for the allocation of public housing to various categories of families, the largest being those cleared from Crown land to make way for permanent development. The Committee also oversees the management of- Licensed Areas. These are a form of temporary public housing for those who have a housing problem but for one reason or another cannot be offered a flat in a public housing estate. The Authority has greatly improved living conditions in these Licensed Areas and the new ones are a world apart from the old Licensed Areas.
The clearance of Crown land is a delicate operation and the Housing Department's staff have shown great ability and tact in this field. It is very much to their credit that such large tracts of land have been cleared virtually without incident, year after year, to enable Hong Kong's development to proceed smoothly. An important aspect of clearance work is the payment of cash compensation to commercial or industrial squatter operators involved in these clearances, and the Operations Committee has to keep the levels of cash compensation under constant review to ensure that they do justice both to the person cleared and the taxpayers. After all these clearees have been occupying Crown land illegally and free of charge for years and you might say their good luck has now run out.
Some of them
/of course