Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1955-1956 — Page 8

measures including the free feeding of thousands of persons for several months. But perhaps the most serious aspect of all was that almost every site required for permanent purposes such as housing, schools, clinics, hospitals or for sale by public auction, was occupied either partially or completely by squatters and could not therefore be developed until the squatters were cleared.

4.

The decision taken by Government was to establish resettlement areas into which the squatters could be gradually moved. There they would be offered sites on which they could build themselves new huts or one-storey cottages at their own expense. The more centrally situated areas such as Homantin and King's Park were known as approved areas and in these the cottages had to conform to certain minimum standards and no wooden huts were allowed. Others, such as Chai Wan and Ngau Tau Kok, were known as tolerated areas and were for the poorer squatters who could not afford to do more than build new wooden huts or rebuild their existing ones. It was hoped at the time that those squatters who were finding it hard to make a living in Hong Kong would return to China when conditions there became more normal.

5. In 1951 it was decided that the administration of these resettlement areas should become the responsibility of a Division of the Urban Services Department which would work under the general direction of the Urban Council. The screening of squatters to determine their eligibility for resettlement, the clearance operations and the squatter prevention patrols still however remained the province of other departments.

6. Progress was slow, chiefly because the majority of squatters either could not afford to build the type of cottage required in an approved area or because they were unwilling to move to the outlying tolerated areas which were far from their places of work. To speed up development of the approved areas the Urban Council allowed contractors to build cottages for sale to persons eligible for resettlement. This system was not a success for various reasons, one of which was that the majority of squatters could not afford to pay the price asked by these contractors.

2