ENG-1978 — Page 128

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Housing and Land

DURING 1978 the government's housing programme gained momentum with con- struction proceeding on 57 projects with a contract value of more than $2,200 million. In October, 1978, in his annual address to the Legislative Council, the Governor said: 'All the laborious work of site acquisition, preparation, design and construction is at last reaching fruition and completions will rise from 18,000 flats this year to 45,000 next year. The Governor said a level of 40,000 to 45,000 flats would be maintained until 1985, providing housing each year for about 250,000 people.

Hong Kong's public housing programme was launched in early 1954 following a disastrous fire on Christmas Day, 1953, in the Shek Kip Mei squatter area which left 50,000 people homeless.

When the public housing programme started, the situation appeared desperate indeed. An immense influx of immigrants had boosted the population from 600,000 to more than two million. The excess of births over deaths was more than 1,000 a week and there was nowhere to live. The stock of some 170,000 dwellings, mostly in substandard pre-war tenement buildings devoid of proper sanitary and living facilities, was pitifully inadequate. Division and further subdivision into cubicles and bedspaces had robbed their floors of any light and air they once might have possessed. The late-comers, and those who could not bear the overcrowding or afford the soaring rents, took to the paddy fields and steep hillsides where they built flimsy huts of tin, wood and cardboard which, at that time, housed one-quarter of the population. It was in these crowded areas that the squatter fires were so prevalent in the dry winter

season.

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Only 53 days after the great Shek Kip Mei fire the decision to provide government housing had been taken, and the Public Works Department had built two-storey emergency blocks sufficient to house 35,000 people. These soon gave way to the six and seven-storey Mark I resettlement blocks which are still a feature of the urban scene and still house more than 400,000 people.

In 1954, the Resettlement Department was formed to clear and rehouse squatters and to manage the new blocks. The Housing Authority was also established to build and manage a rather better type of public housing for which tenement dwellers, in crowded conditions and with low incomes, could apply on a waiting list. Both types of housing were in overwhelming demand.

Today more than two million people, or about 46 per cent of the population, live in some 400,000 government-provided or subsidised flats. Another two million live in private sector accommodation in some 400,000 flats which are mostly self-contained,