ENG-1966 — Page 32

REVIEW

living on the pavements. Associated with these changes were a new building programme and arrangements for those who had no priority for accommodation.

In 1964 the Hong Kong Building and Loan Agency Limited was set up by the government in conjunction with the Commonwealth Development Corporation and four of the leading banks in the Colony. Its object is to make mortgage finance available at reason- able rates on a long-term basis to those in the middle-income bracket who cannot afford to make a full down-payment for their flat. By the end of 1966 the Agency had approved 71 blocks containing 4,511 flats for loan purposes and had approved 616

혹 applications for a total of $18.3 million.

Private enterprise, which has provided new accommodation for about 830,000 people in the last 10 years, has tended in recent years to build smaller flats for sale by instalments to purchasers of moderate, though not low means. Meanwhile it has continued to build tenement accommodation capable of subdivision and renting out at rates which unhappily lend themselves to the crea- tion of new slums. Private development is not solving the problem of our older slums which continue to rot and disintegrate. The Report of the Working Party on Slum Clearance, published in 1965, recommended government action to cut through the problems posed by private ownership and vested interest in slum property and suggested one of the more densely populated areas on Hong Kong Island as a pilot 'renewal', scheme.

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There has thus been a clear extension over the past decade or so in the area of intervention by the government in providing or assisting in the provision of housing. During the same period, standards of basic resettlement accommodation have been improved considerably and the gap between this and other forms of sub- sidized housing has been distinctly narrowed. At the same time, rents in all forms of subsidized housing have been raised to a moderate extent to allow for rising costs, in keeping with rising economic standards. To watch over the progress being made in all types of housing, to assess past and future housing needs, not exclud- ing ancillary social and employment facilities and the balance between types of houses, and to advise on co-ordination in executing housing