ENG-1970 — Page 164

LAND AND HOUSING

Priority 3: Development clearances 12,558.

Priority 4: Relief from overcrowding 6,139.

121

Priority 5: Pavement dwellers, including rear lane dwellers

169.

Clearances undertaken during the year freed 456.38 acres of land for development. A total of $477,286.14 was paid as ex-gratia com- pensation to people who had opened up land for cultivation without legal tenure before October 1954 and to pigbreeders. A total of 154 shops were cleared, of which 144 qualified for cash allowances totalling $864,000. In addition, 281 factories and workshops had to be cleared. Of these, 203 were resettled into resettlement factory estates, while 75 were not eligible for resettlement and three rejected resettlement.

F

Squatters were originally resettled to resettlement cottage areas and 15 of these still remain in various parts of the urban area and the New Territories. The population of these cottage areas has diminished as clearance for development continues and the occupants are resettled in multi-storey estates. However, cottage areas still house 57,500 people. Several of these areas contain many small factories, shops and workshops, together with schools, clinics and welfare centres of various types largely established by voluntary agencies which generously continue to maintain these facilities. As far back as 1953, it was realised that the building of cheap bungalows in cottage resettlement areas was not the fundamental solution to our housing problem. For one thing, land in the urban area is so scarce and so valuable that one-storey development in resettlement areas must be regarded as only a temporary expedient. It was then decided that the main housing problem was the provi- sion of multi-storey permanent housing at low rental for families of the hundreds of thousands living in unhygienic and overcrowded conditions. These are described in the section on housing.

Under the auspices of the Urban Council the Resettlement Department also administers multi-storey resettlement factory blocks for the small factories cleared for permanent development. Because of the need to use a simple design in order to keep construction costs, and therefore rents, as low as possible a number of trades cannot be accommodated in the multi-storey factory blocks and