Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1968-1969 — Page 7

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION AND REVIEW OF THE YEAR

INTRODUCTION

AT the end of March 1969 there were, in round figures, 1,098,000 people living in resettlement estates and cottage areas, that is about 27% of the Colony's population; but 400,000 people still remained in squatter areas or on rooftops, and there were a further 28,000 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 the responsibility of the New Territories Administration). These two categories—former squatters now resettled and squatters not yet resettled-together make up more than a third of Hong Kong's total population.

2. The roots of the squatter problem go back to the war and the immediate post-war period. During the Japanese occupation, many residents left or were expelled from the Colony, and the population at the end of the war had dropped to 600,000. The liberation of Hong Kong, and, later, 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.

3. Attempts to solve the problem date back to 1948 when squatters in the central urban areas, 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

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