TNAG-0317-FCO40-353-Policy-of-housing-and-resettlement-in-Hong-Kong-problem-of-s-1971 — Page 42

HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL

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Mr. SALES for this opportunity to draw attention to this aspect of the department's work. The following descrip- tion is a summary of the one given in the report.

For squatter control purposes, the urban area is divided into three districts (Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and Kwun Tong) each of which is under the charge of a Resettlement Officer and is divided into two sections with an Assistant Resettlement Officer in charge of each. Sections are sub- divided into patrol areas which are the responsibility of Resettlement Assistants and their supporting staff of gangers and labourers. The Resettlement Assistant is required to know his patrol area intimately, no easy task when an area may contain from 1,500 to 2,000 structures and between 6,000 and 15,000 people, and covers anything up to 3,000 acres of hilly ground.

The function of the patrolling Resettlement Assistant is basically to see that his area remains "frozen", that is, that no unauthorized new building takes place. Structures which are presumed to have been erected before August 1954 or which have since been expressly "tolerated" following subsequent surveys, the last of which was in 1964, are specially marked and records are kept of them. Tolerated structures, as the name implies, are allowed to remain undisturbed until they have to be demolished to make way for permanent development, when the occupants are resettled into the estates. When a Resettlement Assistant finds an entirely new building or an unauthorized extension to a tolerated structure, he tries to persuade the owner to demolish it. If the owner fails to do this (as happens more often than not), the building is demolished by the department and the confiscated building materials may subsequently be used to help the poorer squatters in building huts in licensed areas.

During the calendar year ending December 1970, a total of 12,010 new or re-erected structures or extensions to tolerated ones were demolished by the Resettlement Department's Squatter Control staff, and another 3,428 were dismantled by their owners. 423 of these were on the roofs of permanent buildings. It may be of interest that corresponding figures for previous years are not very different. For example in 1969, 11,974 structures or extensions were demolished by Squatter Control staff and another 4,224 were dismantled by their owners and the corresponding figures for 1968 were 11,140 and 4,134 respectively.