ENG-1982 — Page 148

8

Housing and Land

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HOUSING remains one of the government's top priorities, with land formation and public housing accounting for a large slice of the annual budget. With virtually all developable land in the urban areas exhausted, communities are mushrooming in the New Territories where new towns are being planned and implemented by the New Territories Development Department with its responsibilities for providing formed land, roads, drainage, sewage, and the whole infrastructure. Self-contained estates in these new towns form the bulk of public housing production by the Housing Authority.

The number of flats produced by the Housing Authority now averages 35 000 a year and plans are well in hand to maintain this level of production throughout this decade. In the 1981-2 financial year, the Housing Authority completed a record 35 745 flats, of which 4 399 were for sale under the Home Ownership Scheme. A further 3 725 rental flats built by the Housing Society boosted public housing production to almost 40 000, while the private sector also set a new record with completion of more than 34 000 flats and houses.

Since the public housing programme was launched in 1954, 450 000 families, or more than 40 per cent of the population, have been accommodated. Early estates were fairly rudimentary, designed as emergency housing for tens of thousands of new arrivals to Hong Kong who had subsequently been made homeless in fires or whose makeshift shacks posed health or other hazards. Through the years, parallel programmes with upgraded facilities were implemented to give overcrowded families in old tenement buildings the opportunity of moving into public housing. But as the population grew through intermittent waves of immigration, and Hong Kong began to prosper as a commercial centre, it became apparent that future housing policy would need to be co-ordinated under a single authority. Thus in 1973 the present Housing Authority was established and given the task of undertaking a 10-year programme aimed at providing homes for all those in need then estimated at 1.5 million. Events such as the mid-1970s oil crisis and recession followed by the negative influence of nearly 400 000 immigrants in 1978-80 made it necessary to re-phase the programme to a more manageable level. Estates built under the new authority are designed as self-contained communities with full shopping, social and schooling facilities. As developable urban land became increasingly scarce, development spread to the once rural New Territories to the north and west of Kowloon, where most new public housing now forms the nucleus of several new towns.

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Squatter fires during the 1981-2 dry season left another 25 000 people homeless bringing the total rehousing commitment for such victims to 50 000 over the past three years. A further 6 000 squatters lost their homes to flooding and landslips during mid-year rainstorms. Since most of these victims were relatively new arrivals, they were eligible only for temporary accommodation. With most existing temporary housing areas already full or committed, many thousands had to be put up in emergency transit centres pending