Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1955-1956 — Page 6

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

THE SQUATTER PROBLEM, 1947-55

The squatter problem first became serious in 1947 when large numbers of immigrants from China were unable to find accommodation in Hong Kong, partly because so many buildings had been damaged or destroyed by looting and bombing during the war.

Many of these immigrants were pre-war residents of Hong Kong and numbers of them built wooden shacks on bombed sites in the middle of densely populated districts. These sites thus became a health and fire risk and Government took action in 1948 to require these squatters to move to sites on the fringes of the urban areas where they would cause less of a nuisance.

2. The stream of immigrants continued to increase how- ever and became almost a flood in 1949 after the defeat of the Nationalist Forces in South China. By the end of that year the population of Hong Kong had increased from the 1945 figure of 600,000 to at least 2 million, of whorn about 300,000 were in the squatter areas. Several of these squatter areas were dense concentrations of one, two and three-storey wooden huts with populations of anything from 30,000 to 60,000.

3. In January, 1950 the first of the big squatter fires occurred when 20,000 persons were made homeless in the Kowloon City district. This fire drew the attention of the public in dramatic fashion to the fact that these large squatter areas were becoming a menace to the Colony as a whole. They not only presented a serious and increasing fire hazard but the sanitary conditions in them were so appalling that they were also a threat to the health of a large part of the urban areas of Hong Kong and Kowloon. Moreover, every squatter fire was a costly business to the tax-payer since it resulted in considerable Government expenditure on the necessary emergency relief

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