The Second World War and the civil war in China resulted in an influx of people from Chinese Mainland to Hong Kong. The new immigrants built and settled in very simple wooden squatter huts on hillsides. At the end of 1953, a massive fire swept through the squatter huts of Shek Kip Mei, where over 50,000 people lost their homes overnight. To solve the need to house these victims, the Hong Kong Government built 29 blocks of resettlement buildings, each of which were 6 or 7 storeys high, at the location. This was the first generation of public housing in Hong Kong, and profoundly influenced the government’s future public housing policies. Among these resettlement buildings, only Mei Ho House, built in 1954, still stands today.

Apart from public housing and private estates, there were also low-density residences in the district. In the early 1950s, low-density garden villas began to be developed at the hill between the Kowloon-Canton Railway and Tai Hang Tung. These were named ‘Yau Yat Chuen’, and modelled upon the garden villa district of Kowloon Tong. The roads in this area were all named after famous flowers of China, such as Peony Road, Begonia Road, Marigold Road etc. The main road, Tat Chee Avenue, was named after the candied ginger trader U Tat-chee, who proposed the building of the area.