ENG-1958 — Page 203

170

HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

have already been converted in this way to provide quarters for the estate administrative staff. In 1957 one block at Lo Fu Ngam estate and another at Wong Tai Sin estate were built entirely as self-contained flats in order to rehouse families who were living in accommodation of a similar standard at the time of clearance. Each of these flats has its own bathroom, kitchen and small private balcony. The rent, including rates and water charges, is $45 a month for a flat of 240 square feet and $65 a month for a flat of 360 square feet.

Most squatter areas that have to be cleared contain not only domestic squatters but also workshops and small factories. Some of these can be resettled in ground floor_rooms of resettlement estates, but these rooms are unsuitable for the larger concerns and those using power-driven machinery. To meet this need an experimental resettlement factory was built at Cheung Sha Wan in 1957; it is a five-storey building with 94,000 square feet of floor space, and it is of the same basic design as the standard resettle- ment domestic block. The rents have been calculated to cover all recurrent costs and to provide for the recovery of the capital cost in twenty one years, with interest at 5%. Rents vary from floor to floor, the average being $55 a month, including rates, for the standard unit of 200 square feet. The experiment has been a success and similar factories, with minor modifications, are to be built in new estates.

The development of the fourteen cottage resettlement areas has not been on the same scale. These areas are essentially temporary in nature; as the needs of the Colony extend most of them will, in the course of time, be required to make way for permanent development, and the opportunity for further extension is corre- spondingly limited. They are administered by the Resettlement Department, which is responsible for the provision and main- tenance of terracing and paths; cottages are nowadays built by voluntary organizations, which either rent them direct to the settlers or hand them over to the Government for disposal. During the year a total of 689 new cottages were built, of which 178 replaced previously existing wooden huts, and the population of the areas rose from 76,420 to 80,492.

38,223 squatters were cleared and resettled during 1958, and 96.16 acres of land were freed for development. The areas cleared