Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1957-1958 — Page 34

81. The number of cottages built by charitable and non-profit making organizations totalled 4,006 at the end of the year under review. Most of them were built before 1955, but work has continued since then on the limited number of sites left, and at Chuk Yuen a start was made on replacing old wooden huts with stone cottages on the same sites. This year 625 new cottages were built; of these the Salvation Army built twenty, the Church World Service forty nine, the American Presbyterian Mission three, various Catholic Churches donated eleven cottages, and the National Catholic Welfare Conference again played a notable part by building 542 cottages—and more will be built in the coming year. These attractive cottages have a floor area of 125 - 150 sq. ft. and cost about $1,200: they are rented to the settlers by the Resettlement Department for $10 per month.

82. The number of persons to the acre in the cottage areas varies considerably from one area to another but the average is about 400, as against an average at present of about 2,200 persons to the acre in the multi-storey estates. Although this is not an entirely fair comparison, since much of the land in a cottage area consists of steep and unusable banks, it is none the less true to say that the living conditions in a small cottage on a hillside terrace are in general pleasanter than those in a room of a similar size in a multi-storey building, even though they may be less convenient, particularly in wet weather, in that the communal water standpipes and latrines are usually some distance

away.

83. Development of these areas is now on a minor scale because the extreme shortage of land adjoining the urban areas makes it necessary to use every available site for multi-storey buildings to meet the demand for factories, schools, housing estates and private enterprise housing. There is the further point that although one-storey buildings are cheaper to build in terms of cost of square foot of floor space there are other factors which make this form of resettlement expensive: the capital cost of making the terraces, roads, paths, steps and drains is often considerable; and even when these essentials have been provided the cottage areas are still expensive to maintain and to protect against erosion and rainstorm damage.

84. Particulars of the population of the various cottage areas will be found at Appendix I at the end of this Report.

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