Why Some Hong Kong Squatter Villages Survived

When Alan Smart moved to Hong Kong to conduct anthropological research for his doctoral dissertation, he wanted to buy a house for himself, his wife and their infant daughter. Instead, they found themselves living in the disused back office of a Diamond Hill factory. 

“It was seven by five feet. You couldn’t actually fit a bed in there so we put in a few crates and a mattress and a crib for our daughter,” says Smart. “We were there for five months and intended to stay longer, but our dwelling was destroyed by a fire.”

Smart and his Hong Kong-born wife hadn’t ended up in Diamond Hill by accident. This was 1982, when the neighbourhood in East Kowloon was a sprawling collection of squatter villages that stretched from the high-rise factories of San Po Kong uphill towards Lion Rock. Smart was in town to do anthropological research for his doctoral dissertation on how the clearance of squatter settlements affected the people living in them. 

At the time, roughly 12 percent of Hong Kong’s population of 5.2 million people lived in any of 1,049 squatter areas, with a total of 578,000 structures counted by government survey in 1982. Squatting had become common after the end of World War II, when a mass influx of migrants from mainland China overwhelmed Hong Kong’s limited post-war housing supply and people were forced to build homes on any spare bit of land they could find. With squatter villages regularly destroyed by fires and landslides, including the devastating Shek Kip Mei fire of 1953 that left 53,000 people homeless, the colonial government had been gradually clearing squatter areas and relocating their residents into public housing.

“I had been reading some work on disaster research and in some ways resettlement is like a disaster for people – but anthropogenic rather than natural,” says Smart. “I realised that with a resettlement, you could do something that would be impossible with an earthquake or a flood, and that’s to do a pre-study of the community before it’s affected.”

The perception of some cities is dominated by their informal settlements. What would Rio de Janeiro be without its favelas? And yet Hong Kong’s squatter villages are seen almost as a footnote of history, a brief detour on the road to the high-rise metropolis that exists today. But they were much more important to the city’s life and economy than many people realise. And they haven’t disappeared: more than 200,000 people still live in squatter settlements today. In a sense both figurative and literal, the story of squatters is the story of Hong Kong.

We’ve written about this before, from Feng Chi-shun’s memoir of life in Diamond Hill to the current reality of Pok Fu Lam Village, which blurs the line between historic village and squatter settlement – a common situation, as many squatters set up in the fields that surrounded the old villages of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories. In the busy postwar decades, squatter areas were home to informal factories and workshops that helped fuel Hong Kong’s industrial expansion. 

Alan Smart encountered all of this first-hand in Diamond Hill. He initially hoped to lease a place to live but quickly discovered that the ambiguity of land ownership in squatter villages meant that almost nothing was available for rent. “We couldn’t afford to buy – it would have taken almost the entire research grant to buy a 150-square-foot wooden house,” he says. They ended up in the factory office when the owner offered to let them stay there for free. 

Living in Diamond Hill as outsiders turned out to be an asset when conducting research. “Our daughter was a big icebreaker who got people to talk,” says Smart. “We made a lot of friends.” He noted a disconnect between how squatter villages were perceived on the outside — dirty and dangerous — and the day-to-day reality inside. That was especially true in Diamond Hill, which contained several ancient villages and was well located near industrial areas, with good public transport access to the rest of Hong Kong. 

“Squatters there at the time had an income 78 percent of the Hong Kong average, which was basically solid middle-class territory,” says Smart. Public health studies found that squatter villages had similar morbidity and mortality rates as low-income private housing, despite the lack of clean water and proper sewerage. “They had higher rates of infectious disease but lower rates of respiratory disease because they had access to outdoor space and larger living units,” says Smart. “Some people were very attached to their place, particularly if they were from a village where their ancestors were generations before. Even post-war migrants became very attached.”

Like the Kowloon Walled City — itself a kind of squatter settlement — Diamond Hill and other squatter areas suffered from the perception of being crime-infested. Smart found that the most established parts of Diamond Hill, near the present-day MTR station, were actually quite safe and orderly. That was largely because they were controlled by triad groups, some of which were headquartered in the area and had a vested interest in keeping things calm. “There was an expression that said, ‘Rabbits don’t eat the grass around their hole,’” says Smart.

A squatter village covers a hillside in Shun Tin, in east Kowloon, in this photo from 1985. Image via Ko Tim-keung

Areas further up the hillside were more unruly. They were controlled by the Big Circle Boys, a gang started in the 1970s by former Red Guards who had fled to Hong Kong after their radical paramilitary movement was suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army. “They were more disorganised and violent and tended to engage in crimes with guns,” says Smart. “They didn’t mind preying on the local people and selling them drugs and recruiting kids to be dealers.”All the while, Hong Kong’s colonial leaders were debating what to do with the squatter areas. There was never a clear vision; “a process of muddling through” is how Smart and co-author Charles Fung Chi-keung describe it in their 2023 book Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Informality and Geopolitics 1963–1985.

In 1970, three years after the 1967 riots, newly-elected British prime minister Edward Heath wrote to Hong Kong governor David Trench to express concern about the state of the colony’s squatter areas, which were seen as a potential source of political and social instability. In the recollection of Hugh Norman-Walker, then the territory’s colonial secretary, Heath asked “if we could not do something more about them.” Until then, the Hong Kong government’s policy had been to do precisely as little as possible, reacting only when a fire or redevelopment project cleared out a squatter area. Grudgingly, colonial leaders began to think about the future of squatter areas. 

“Resettlement of squatters was an undesired and reluctantly adopted solution, conditioned by the way in which the geopolitical situation — a precarious colony on the edge of Communist China during the Cold War — made squatter clearance without resettlement impractical and risky,” write Smart and Feng in their book. After Trench was succeeded by Murray MacpokLehose, the government launched the Ten-Year Housing Programme, which offered permanent public housing for anyone living in a squatter hut that had been surveyed in 1964, and temporary housing for those living in huts built afterwards. But the government simply wasn’t able to build enough housing fast enough to accommodate everyone eligible.

Another potential solution was to upgrade squatter villages to make them less prone to natural disasters. That was the motivation for the Squatter Area Improvement Programme launched in 1982, which aimed to provide legal electricity, water and other services to squatter areas, while shoring up their resistance to landslides and fires. This built on years of ad hoc efforts to improve the quality of life in squatter areas; beginning in 1952, the Hong Kong Settlers’ Housing Corporation began building rent-to-own stone cottages in squatter villages, offering a simple but sturdy alternative to the wood shacks that many squatters lived in. But it quickly became clear that the cost of upgrading squatter areas would be enormous. The programme was shut down after just two years. 

The government instead decided to adopt a policy of long-term elimination of all squatter areas. In 1984, the Squatter Occupancy Survey was launched with the aim of freezing squatter settlements in place: no new squatter housing would be tolerated, and while residents recorded in the survey would be allowed to stay put, they wouldn’t be able to expand or significantly improve their homes. (Squatter structures on rooftops and in back alleys, including alleyway barber shops, were excluded from the survey.) 

The result has been a long and slow attrition in the number of squatter villages around Hong Kong. Most of the centrally located and high profile squatter areas have been redeveloped; the last part of the Diamond Hill squatter area was torn down in 2000. 

But there are still pockets of squatters all over Hong Kong. The majority of squatter settlements today are in the New Territories, where they often go unnoticed – unless there is a major development project like the high-speed railway to Shenzhen, which sparked protests when it led to the demolition of Choi Yuen, a squatter village in Yuen Long. Some squatter settlements are centrally located, like Cha Kwo Ling Village in Kowloon and Pok Fu Lam Village on Hong Kong Island. As recently as 2010, there was a 400-square-foot squatter hut across the street from Times Square, which was cleared only after a high-profile court case in which its resident claimed adverse possession, a legal principle that gives squatters title to their property if they have lived there without challenge for 12 years on private property or 60 years on government land.

Four decades after the Squatter Occupancy Survey, however, the squatter situation is anything but settled. “Compared to the 80s, the government does not really seem to know what is going on,” says Smart. Many residents of squatter settlements today are tenants who rent their homes from the so-called owners, leaving them vulnerable if there is any attempt at redevelopment, since tenants are not eligible for compensation. It’s also unclear what the future holds for the squatter villages left in urban areas. Pok Fu Lam Village seems unlikely to be touched, but it remains in legal limbo as most residents lack any title to their land despite the settlement’s long history. In Kowloon, most of Ngau Chi Wan Village is slated to make way for public housing.

“There’s a sense that squatters are something relegated to the past,” says Smart. “It’s disappeared from the radar.” But they’re very much a part of Hong Kong today – and a key to understanding how the city that exists now came to be.