One year after the Communists took over, the colony’s population reached 2,360,000. More than 330,000 people were living in hillside squatter settlements, sleeping on the sidewalks, on tenement rooftops, even in the center strip of the widest Kowloon streets. A shacktown fire in 1950 drove 20,000 persons from their homes. The next year a single fire dishoused 10,000 people, and a series of fires in 1952 burned out 15,000 others.
Sooner or later, colony officials told themselves, the refugees would return to China as the immigrant waves of other years had done. The government took a firm stand on the doctrine that it was not supposed to become the landlord for millions of its residents, but it yielded sufficiently to erect temporary wooden huts and bungalows for 40,000 squatters.
All the high-principled resolutions to stay out of the public housing business were swept away on Christmas Night, 1953. A roaring conflagration broke out at Shek Kip Mei, in Upper Kowloon, racing up the tiers of hillside shacks as if it were mounting a flight of steps. Somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 people were left homeless. About half of them found shelter with friends or relatives, and the government was plunged into the enormous task of feeding, clothing and rehousing the fire victims.
Pausing just long enough to permit the displaced people to sift their few remaining possessions from the ashes, the government bulldozed the 45-acre site, leveled the ground, and had erected emergency accommodations on it in fifty-three days. The streets had hardly been cleared of homeless people when a new shack fire at Tai Hang Tung dishoused 24,000 others.
Simultaneously, the colony recognized the inadequacy of its cottage-and-bungalow housing, which required too much land and provided for too few people. It began the construction of multi-story resettlement estates—six- and seven-story blocks of reinforced concrete clustered together in populous communities. Eleven such estates, lodging 360,000 people in fireproof and typhoon-proof structures, have been completed since 1954 at a cost of $32,000,000. One toilet is shared by hundreds of people and there is no electric light in the rooms unless the tenant pays extra for it. But when they are seen beside the remaining shacks, the multi-story blocks seem immeasurably superior. In addition to the multi-story estates, 80,000 persons have been housed in fourteen cottage resettlement areas.
An apartment in a resettlement block is a concrete-walled room, renting for $1.60 to $4.60 a month. The Hong Kong Housing Authority has built a higher-quality low-cost apartment in skyscraper developments, renting from $8 to $23 a month, and 106,000 persons are to be accommodated in them by 1964.
Around 30,000 people live in flats built by the Hong Kong Housing Society, a voluntary group aided by government loan funds, and this number will be doubled in a few years. If the colony maintains its present rate of building, it can provide new apartments for 100,000 persons annually for the next five years.
This small mountain of statistics looms large on the landscape until you consider that there are now about 500,000 to 600,000 people living in squatter shacks, on sidewalks and rooftops and in tumbledown firetrap tenements. Theoretically, they could all be rehoused in five or six years, but the colony’s population is rising meanwhile at the rate of 150,000 a year.
The dreams of Hong Kong housing officials are haunted by figures; a baby born every five minutes and illegal immigrants sneaking across the border at an incalculable rate. Illegal immigration is never estimated at less than 10,000 a year and often set as high as 40,000. Popular guesswork may jack it up to 20,000 a month.