ENG-1990 — Page 23

SHAPING UP FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

authorities should be bent to devising incentives for the developers to replace the old buildings with something that gives everybody more room and at the same time exploits the vast new areas of development for a city with space as well as wealth. Clearly, we must avoid going overboard in our desire to make the fullest use of new opportunities to restructure our city. There has to be a comprehensive framework to mould develop- ment into forms that satisfy both commercial expectations and community aspirations. To that end a comprehensive development strategy known as Metroplan has been produced to create a land use/transport/environmental guide for public and private sector investment.

People are already getting more room to live in. Hong Kong is often described as a prime example of the success of private enterprise where the government keeps out of business. Yet half the people live in state-owned property.

The government went into housing with the utmost reluctance. As a young man I was involved with relief measures after squatter fires when thousands of people were left homeless. I had to manage the screening of squatters cleared for development when all they were offered as resettlement was four pegs in the ground marking a plot where they could build. Gradually a little government money was found to do some site formation, to provide stand pipes, to pave paths, to do a good deal but not to provide housing. It was not until a meeting at six o'clock in the morning of Boxing Day in 1953 that Sir Alexander Grantham took the decision to put the government into housing. Until then this initiative had been resisted because the pre-war experience, which weighed so heavily with the unofficial Members of Executive Council, had been that welfare in Hong Kong attracted people from Kwangtung in overwhelming numbers so it was better not to have too much of it. The Shek Kip Mei fire on Christmas night, which burned down the homes of 53 000 people, made drastic action necessary. It was not the first squatter fire, nor the last, but it was the biggest. Previous relief measures, including well meaning private funding of fireproof huts, were simply not on a scale that could do any good.

The resettlement programme of the fifties was not a housing programme for the poor. It was a means to clear land for development. You could not apply for a resettlement flat. You were offered one if your hut was about to be pulled down. What you were offered was a concrete box allowing 24 square feet a head, in a seven storey structure with no lifts, no windows but wooden shutters, no water, but access to communal kitchens and bathrooms. If this sounds dreadful, it was, but such was the alternative that people fought to get into the new blocks where you had your own place legally - and it would not burn down.

Once into housing, policy evolved through the first Housing Authority, through Government Low Cost Housing to the present Authority which embraced everything that had gone before and has launched new initiatives in the Home Ownership Scheme and Private Sector Participation. The last of the old resettlement blocks are coming down. The new estates have three rooms as well as kitchens and bathrooms. The estates have a full range of community and commercial facilities, are quiet and relatively crime free.

Home ownership, now at 40 per cent will increase to 60 per cent by the turn of the century. A substantial portion of this will still be in public housing as more flats are sold to tenants. Management in the public estates is increasingly sophisticated with concern for the elderly, the environment and the continually improving standard of new accommodation.

The strength of the government's intervention in the housing market has not eliminated private enterprise. There too the scale has increased with great new estates on large tracts

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