Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1970-1971 — Page 7

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

At the end of March 1971, departmental records showed that, in round figures, 1,156,000 people were living in resettlement estates and cottage areas; but 358,000 people still remained in squatter areas or the like, or on rooftops; and there were a further 34,700 living in licensed areas. (These figures exclude the large squatter population in the New Terri- tories outside Tsuen Wan district, which is the responsibility of the New Territories Administration). These two categories-former squat- ters 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 'squat- ters' 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, but the Reset- tlement Department as such was not established until 1954. On Christmas Day 1953 a fire broke out in a densely crowded squatter area at Shek Kip Mei making more than 50,000 people homeless. Although by no means the first serious fire in a squatter area this was the worst, and it precipitated Government action on a large scale. Within weeks, temporary two-storey buildings were built on the fire site, to be replaced within months by the first multi-storey housing

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