ENG-1957 — Page 35

24

HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

that only bold action could hope to provide a remedy. The Government accepted the task of rehousing the homeless as a charge upon public funds and itself assumed the role. of direct landlord to a potential 20% of the population.

It was now clear that the future of resettlement lay in one direction and one direction only-intensive vertical de- velopment in place of extensive horizontal development. In the weeks immediately following the Shek Kip Mei fire, the Government built temporary two-storey resettlement blocks to meet the immediate need of putting a roof over the heads of the homeless while the architects prepared plans for ver- tical development. By the summer the first six-storey blocks were under construction and by the autumn the standard height was increased to seven storeys. By then a standard pattern for the resettlement blocks had been evolved, and this basic prototype has stood the test of experience sur- prisingly well. The huge H-shaped blocks have become a familiar feature of the Kowloon landscape and by the end of 1957 there were 60 completed blocks in six different estates, accommodating between them some 137,000 people.

In 1954 the proposed Housing Authority was set up; it was composed of the members of the Urban Council together with three members to be nominated by the Governor. By the end of the year three building sites had been allocated to the Authority, two of them, at North Point and Cadogan Street, being on the Island, and the third at So Uk, in north-west Kowloon. The plans for North Point and So Uk were on a scale never before attempted in Hong Kong in conventional low-cost housing. Those for the North Point estate provided some 2,000 flats with potential accom- modation for about 12,000 people. The So Uk project, twice as big, has been designed to house about 31,000 people in blocks of flats ranging from 12 to 15 storeys. By the end of 1957 the North Point estate was complete and part already occupied, whilst work on the Cadogan Street and So Uk projects continued.