ENG-1959 — Page 22

REVIEW

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Welfare Fund in addition to its normal loans from the Hong Kong Government. The other body referred to, the Hong Kong Settlers Housing Corporation, erected 1,700 cottage units housing 10,000 persons between 1951 and 1954, but then ceased operations temporarily because of the scarcity of suitable sites. It is now planning a multi-storey estate at Tai Hang Sai, Kowloon, and, when this estate is completed in mid-1961, the Corporation will have built a total of 2,500 dwellings housing approximately 20,000

persons.

To complete the story of housing for middle-income groups, Government has lent some $81.34 million to Co-operative Societies of locally recruited Government Servants to enable them to erect 2,839 flats, owned by their Co-operatives. Applications for further loans involving a total of $10.8 million for an additional 314 flats are at present under consideration.

The story of Hong Kong's housing effort so far covers the well-to-do, who have been catered for by private enterprise; the squatters; and the middle-income earners: but there is still another class in urgent need of better housing. These are the tenement dwellers living in old, and often extremely dilapidated and dangerous, pre-war buildings. Their right to new accommodation cannot be denied: indeed, in some ways they have a better right to consideration than the squatters, for they are, very broadly speak- ing, older residents in the Colony and not new-comers. Following upon the Report of a Special Committee on Housing, presented in December 1958, the Government decided during 1959 that the time had come to make a start with the problem of rehousing persons living in such sub-standard premises. The accommodation to be built for this purpose will be of an 'improved resettlement type', and priority will be given to persons occupying buildings certified as dangerous; then to tenants of properties cleared to give way for Government schemes; and lastly to tenement dwellers earning less than $300 per month. The designers hope to be able to keep the rent of this accommodation down to between $24 and $30 a month, exclusive of rates, and the initial intention is to rehouse 20,000 tenement dwellers yearly.

The Resettlement Department will assume over-all responsibility for both the planning and subsequent administration of this new type of very low-cost housing, and will thus extend its functions