ENG-1977 — Page 142

8

Housing and Land

Quill

IN October, 1977, the Governor summed up the government housing drive when he said that the 'housing programme is now in top gear. From 14,000 flats this year, completion will rise to 20,000 next year and more than 40,000 in 1979-80 with capacity for about 250,000 people. About five to six years of this rate of completions should break the back of the problem as we have known it. This is a prodigious amount of housing by any standards and it will certainly change Hong Kong. But I think we

all agree that, in this respect, Hong Kong needs change.'

Hong Kong's housing problem has stemmed from the population increasing seven- fold since the end of World War II. In 1945, the population was 600,000; by the end of 1947 it was about 1.8 million; now it is more than 4.5 million. Immigrants – and particularly a great inflow of refugees in 1948-9 from the civil war in China were a major cause of the population explosion, but the high birth rate of a young popula- tion also was an important factor. In 1954, the excess of births over deaths was more than 1,000 a week.

The rapid increase in population put strains on all social facilities and plans and, on top of this, Hong Kong was faced with an acute shortage of land suitable for development. In the early 1950s, the total area of the territory was about 1,012 square kilometres. Reclamation over the years has boosted this to about 1,045 square kilo- metres, but much of the land is mountainous and unsuitable for development. This equation of high population and land shortage has necessitated the construction of high-rise housing projects, both public and private.

The first public housing started in early 1954 after a disastrous fire swept through a squatter township at Shek Kip Mei in Kowloon, leaving 50,000 homeless. The govern- ment stepped in and, just 53 days later, the Public Works Department had built enough two-storey emergency quarters to house 35,000. By December, 1954, the first of the now familiar resettlement blocks were completed and a huge public housing pro- gramme was under way.

Today, more than two million people, or 46 per cent of the population, live in government-subsidised accommodation in Hong Kong. During 1977, 101,900 people moved into Housing Authority accommodation, making a total of almost two million in the Housing Authority's 64 public housing estates, with a further 131,010 people in subsidised housing provided by the Hong Kong Housing Society a voluntary government-aided organisation.

But the problem is far from solved, and the government's target is to ensure that every family has a permanent, self-contained home at a rent it can afford. This means