26% of the Colony's population; but 409,000 people still remained in squatter areas or on rooftops, and there were a further 34,000 living in licensed areas and what remained of their predecessors, the old resite areas. (These figures exclude the large squatter population in the New Territories outside Tsuen Wan district, which is not the direct concern of the Resettlement Department. It should also be noted that not all urban squatters live in the familiar wooden or tin-sheet huts: very con- siderable numbers live in permanent buildings of one or more storeys; but since these buildings are unlawful as regards land tenure they are technically squatter structures and are counted as such.) These two categories former squatters now resettled and squatters not yet resettled -together make up over a third of Hong Kong's total population.
3. The roots of the squatter problem go back to the war and the immediate post-war period. During the Japanese occupation, many residents had left or been expelled from the Colony, and the population at the end of the war had dropped to 600,000. The liberation of Hong Kong, followed by the political situation in China, led to the return of former residents together with many new immigrants, so that by 1950 the population had risen to over 2,300,000. Existing accommodation, already overcrowded before 1941 and badly depleted during the war years, was completely inadequate to house the numbers involved. The result was that those who could not find conventional housing took to building shacks illegally wherever they could find space for them, at first in the urban areas and then on the hillsides. Many of these 'squatters' (the legal definition is given in Chapter 2 below) were immigrants from China, but considerable numbers were old Hong Kong residents who had been bought out of their homes by the more wealthy of the new arrivals.
4. Attempts to solve the problem date back to 1948 when squatters in the central urban arcas, mostly living on war-damaged sites, were offered the opportunity to resettle in what were then more outlying districts. These were called 'resettlement areas'. In them settlers built their own huts, while Government provided such basic requirements as paths, drains, a water supply, latrines and public lighting. This was followed, from 1952 onwards, by the construction of cottages for rent or sale to squatters by charitable and non-profit making organizations, notably the Hong Kong Settlers Housing Corporation and the National Catholic Welfare Conference.
5. Useful as these attempts were to come to grips with the problem, they could be no more than palliatives. There were far too many squatters
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