National guidelines on economically affordable housing were
released on Friday night along with new State measures on housing
for low-income families, which come into effect on Saturday.
Economically affordable houses ought to be around 60 square
meters per unit, said the guidelines jointly released by the
Ministry of Construction, the National Development and Reform
Commission, and five other ministries.
It said eligible purchasers will "have limited property rights,"
and that the apartments can only be directly sold after five
years.
Moreover, the document limited fundraising for cooperative
housing units to independent mining corporations on the outskirts
of cities and enterprises with a significant number of employees
with housing problems, while stressing that they must do so with
their own properties.
Eligible applicants of the Measure on Low-rent Housing Security,
meanwhile, are no longer limited to city households with the lowest
income, but will also include all lower-income urban families with
housing issues.
Government subsidies, the usual means of securing housing for
these social groups, are to be gathered from rental fees on
low-rent housing, credit risk reserves, housing provident funds,
social donations and security funds. Local governments must also
spend 10 per-cent of the local land-use fees on developing low-rent
housing, said the measure, released by nine ministries on
Monday.
Because situations vary across the 656 cities that had adopted
the mechanism as of October, the measure allows special funds to be
allocated to central and western regions that find it financially
difficult to support the construction of low-rent homes.
Additionally, the construction area of these apartments, limited
to 50 square meters per unit, should be granted preferential status
on a stand-alone basis in land supply schemes and annual land-use
applications.
Months earlier, the central government urged local governments
to reserve at least 70 percent of the land designated for
residential construction for units under 90 square meters. But
since the housing security system is expected to cover all
low-income Chinese families by 2010, implementation of the new
measure and relevant policies has a long way to go.
Figures from the Ministry of Construction show that nearly 10
million households still live in a housing space, per capita, of
less than 10 square meters. Up to the end of 2006, only 268,000
families, or 6.7 percent of all households living on a minimum
allowance, and 2.7 percent of all low-income households in China,
had benefited from low-rent housing policies.
Despite a record 7.04 billion yuan (9.52 million U.S. dollars)
of central government investment in low-income housing so far this
year, 50 billion yuan is needed every year for the next five years
to continue to broaden coverage, the People's Daily reported.
To address the housing problems of urban low-income families,
for example, Shanghai is to pour in a total of 2 billion yuan in
providing 500,000 square meters of low-rent apartments by the end
of this year, Shanghai's Jiefang Daily reported on Friday.
The money will come from the 8.3 billion yuan coffers of the
Shanghai public housing reserve fund.
Cong Chen, a staffer at the Department of Policy and Regulation
of Shanghai Provident Fund Management Center, confirmed the
information.
The project, launched last month, has already secured 150,000
square meters of land in Jiading, Baoshan and several other
districts in Shanghai, 70 percent of which are completed flats.
These flats are said to be lo-cated in areas with comparatively
mature transportation and living facilities, such as metro stations
and bus stops, for the convenience of low-income tenants, the
Jiefang Daily said.
(China Daily December 1, 2007)
