ENG-1979 — Page 136

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Housing and Land

DESPITE the focus of world attention on the large numbers of Vietnamese refugees who sought temporary refuge in Hong Kong during 1979, another population movement - the entry of about 180,000 immigrants from China - posed far more serious consequences for the government's social programmes, particularly public housing. The 180,000 - comprising both immigrants who entered the territory legally and the remainder who arrived by illegal means - far exceeded the number of Hong Kong residents housed in the 21,000 new flats that became available during the year. The inflow threatened to erode the advances made in an ambitious programme launched in 1973 to provide permanent, self-contained homes for more than a million people then living in unsatisfactory conditions. Moreover, the rate of immigration - equivalent to a 3.8 per cent increase in population - was reminiscent, albeit on a smaller scale, of the very conditions that led to the birth of public housing in the territory 25 years ago.

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In the five years leading up to 1950, an immense influx of Chinese immigrants 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 about 170,000 dwellings, mostly in substandard, pre-war tenements devoid of proper sanitary and living facilities, was manifestly inadequate. Division and further subdivision into cubicles and bed spaces robbed entire floors of light and air. The late-comers, and those who could not bear the desperate overcrowding or afford the soaring rents, took to paddy fields and steep hillsides where they built, with tin, wood and cardboard, flimsy squatter huts which, at that time, housed a quarter of the population.

A disastrous fire, which broke out in the Shek Kip Mei squatter area of Kowloon on Christmas Day, 1953, and left 50,000 people homeless, was the catalyst for Hong Kong's housing programme. Within 53 days, the Public Works Department had built a series of two-storey blocks to provide emergency housing for 35,000 of the fire victims. During 1954, a Resettlement Department was formed to clear and rehouse squatters in six and seven- storey resettlement blocks that are still a feature of the urban scene. A Housing Authority was also set up to build and manage a better type of public housing for which tenement dwellers, living in crowded conditions and earning low incomes, could apply through a waiting list. More than 50 estates were built providing both types of housing, which met with an overwhelming demand that has not diminished over the years. As a result, in 1973 the Resettlement Department and the Housing Authority were amalgamated into a new Housing Authority to oversee the new housing programme. A total of 20 estates - all of them self-contained communities - have so far been built under this programme and today more than two million people, or about 40 per cent of the population, live in public housing of one sort or another provided or subsidised by the government.