ENG-1958 — Page 201

168

HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

Ordinance. The principal statutory responsibilities placed on these Bureaux are to provide Tenancy Tribunals with certain factual information whenever an application is made by a landlord for exemption from control or by a tenant for the reduction of rent. As a direct result of their contact with landlords, principal tenants and sub-tenants, the officers of these Bureaux are drawn into mediating in a large number of minor but varied tenancy disputes. This service has been of great value since the parties concerned are usually reluctant to go to a court, and still more reluctant to testify in public against their closest neighbours. Over one thousand of these arbitration cases were handled by the staff of the Bureaux during 1958 and not one had to be referred for final settlement to a Tribunal or to a Magistrate's Court.

RESETTLEMENT

The squatter problem in Hong Kong is a direct result of the rapid increase in the population of the Colony during the years following the war. The housing available was soon swamped by the stream of immigrants from China, which increased to a flood in 1949 as the Chinese Civil War spread southwards, and those who could not find or could not afford normal accom- modation built squatter shacks on the hillsides, or wherever they could find space. By these means a large part of the urban areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong were soon covered by squatter colonies, some of which had a population of more than 50,000 persons. Squatter fires were frequent, and these colonies, besides constituting a grave health risk, occupied almost all the sites urgently needed for the Colony's rapidly expanding needs, in particular for more houses, more schools and more factories. It was therefore decided in 1951 to establish resettlement areas in which sites for one-storey cottages or huts could be offered to squatters cleared from areas required for permanent development. The living conditions in the cottage resettlement areas were a great improvement on those in the squatter areas, but progress in their development was slow, partly because most squatters could not afford to build cottages on the sites offered, and partly because the only sites available for such development were steep, relatively remote, and on heavily eroded hillsides.