Hong Kong’s urban development has always been driven by two forces: population growth and government policy. Until the 1960s, Hong Kong was a city of low-rise, tile-roofed shophouses and tenements. The crush of refugees that arrived after 1949, when the Communists won the civil war in mainland China, led to extreme overpopulation. Families built ramshackle houses on hillsides, where they were vulnerable to fire and landslides. Others lived on balconies, in hallways and on rooftops. In the early 1950s, the Housing Authority was set up to build housing for the poor, and the Housing Society was given the task of building housing for the middle-class. Building regulations were changed to increase density. Despite these efforts, the 1961 population census found that 68 percent of Hong Kong’s population was inadequately housed, either in squatter settlements, rooftop shanties or in cubicles. Things began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, when large property development companies emerged, with a preference for buildings that were bigger and taller — and thus more lucrative — than the previous form of housing in Hong Kong. Government-led urban renewal was introduced in 1988 with the creation of the Land Development Corporation, an organization that would eventually become the Urban Renewal Authority. Almost all of the old districts of Hong Kong Island, with the exception of the central business district, were slated for renewal. This led to the construction of high-rise apartment buildings capable of holding more than 50-60 units, and thus began decades of urban consolidation to accommodate the severely high population of Hong Kong. Currently Hong Kong has 7,103,700 people in 1,101 km2, and a density 6,452 per km2. This shows that Hong Kong had to rely on urban consolidation to solve its issues of overpopulation, and is very effective in doing so.