Housing's painful history lesson

While history teaches us to learn from our mistakes, sometimes fate conspires to completely undo this neat truism. Let us take for example, Hong Kong's painful, and seemingly never-ending, problems with public housing.

You may be surprised to learn that relatively tiny Hong Kong, with a land mass of just 1,104 sq km, much of it uninhabitable, has the biggest public housing program in the world. Almost half of our population of 7 million - or more than 3 million people - today live in one kind of subsidized public housing or another, occupying flats or units in no fewer than 215 estates - 27 of them on Hong Kong Island side, 180 in the urban areas of Kowloon or spread across the New Territories, and the remaining eight situated on our outlying islands. Public housing blocks are found in every district of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories with one curious exception - Wan Chai - which somehow has escaped the Housing Department's relentless redevelopers.

Returning to Hong Kong's 60-year struggle to solve its housing problem, when we built our first public-housing estate in 1954-55, the government was so broke it had to seek financial help from the United Nations on humanitarian grounds. That aid was the difference between the work being completed on schedule, and tens of thousands of homeless squatters getting a roof over their heads, or the project being deferred for a period of years.

The estate was Shek Kip Mei in Sham Shui Po, and the humanitarian grounds for the UN's help was the cruel situation of no fewer than 53,000 refugees from the mainland left suddenly homeless when their widespread hillside settlement of wooden squatter huts, occupying nearby adjoining hillsides, was engulfed in a massive firestorm on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve night in 1953. Incredibly, every man, woman and child escaped with his or her life - but little did they guess the ordeal about to confront them. They had no choice but to sleep on the streets at the height of a freezing winter.

Hong Kong's government was squeezing its way along on a niggardly budget because the economy was in tatters as a bizarre knock-on effect of the Korean War (1950-53). Global markets, sickened by yet another war in Asia so soon after the horrors of the Pacific War (1941-45), completely dried up for any product seen to have Asian origins, and our nascent manufacturing industry, plus our re-export trade for items made in the mainland, simply collapsed.

With most of the 53,000 survivors of that terrible fire huddled every night on the ice-cold pavements of Sham Shui Po, their inhuman conditions drew critical international attention. The government responded by launching a rush program of emergency temporary housing dubbed "Bowrington Bungalows" - crude five or six-storied wooden structures that were flung up at one end of the fire site. As many families as could be crammed into them were thus given a roof over their heads and a wooden floor and a blanket or two to keep warm overnight.

At record speed for those days the blocks of Hong Kong's first Resettlement Department began to appear at the other end of the site, and within a year or so many of the homeless refugees were housed in them. By no means did all 53,000 so benefit - not surprisingly, some had already moved onto fresh hillsides on the fringes of Kowloon's urban areas and simply rebuilt over-crowded, unsanitary and grossly unhealthy squatter settlements.

Shek Kip Mei Estate's "comforts" almost 60 years ago were grim. In theory each adult was allocated 24 square feet, and each child 12 sq ft. The living quarters were "dog-boxes" of 120 sq ft with wives having to do the cooking on cramped balconies and everybody forced to use a communal toilet and bathing facilities on each floor. Rents were incredibly cheap, ranging from $HK10 to $HK14 per family per month. Families of 10 paid a higher amount - the only way they could sleep was by squeezing into triple-decker bunk beds that took up most of the room's space.

Fast-forward to today, and consider whether or not after almost 60 years' expenditure totaling billions of dollars our housing problems are finally behind us; whether Hong Kong learnt the lesson of its painful housing history and has solved the problem. The answer, sadly, is no. Besides the shameful lot of so many singletons squeezed into "cages" in fetid hovels, there are hundreds of thousands of couples, and even young families of three and four who are today squeezed into tiny spaces where they exist in the most primitive conditions imaginable. And the problem can only grow worse as more couples marry and start families, and others continue to migrate here to try to get a small share of Hong Kong's fabulous opportunities. "No pain, no gain" goes the saying - but how much housing pain will they have to endure before they finally enjoy the gain?

The author is Op-Ed editor of China Daily Hong Kong Edition. albertlin@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 09/20/2013 page9)