A southwest Chinese city on Wednesday will pilot a lottery scheme to allocate public rental apartments to eligible low-income families to protect them from skyrocketing property prices.

The government of Chongqing Municipality says it will build 40 million square meters of apartment buildings in the next three years to house 2 million low- and middle- income people who are over the age of 18 and live in Chongqing's urban center, but who do not own their homes there or live in extremely small homes.

According to the government plan, one-third of the population in Chongqing's urban center will be covered by public rental housing project, with rent 40 percent less than that of comparable commercial housing once the project is completed.

The city has begun to take applications to the low-rent housing since Feb. 12.

Details of the lottery scheme and the numbers of eligible applicants and the public apartments available have not yet been disclosed.

Authorities in Beijing and Shanghai are using a similar lottery scheme to allocate car plate numbers to car buyers in the two cities where traffic congestion and worsening air pollution prompted the government to limit new car registration to curb the car-buying boom.

Observers say Chongqing's pilot program will be followed by other major Chinese cities with sky-high housing prices as the central government is rushing to supply a substantial number of affordable housing to cool the red-hot property market.

The central government last year announced the largest-ever plan to build 10 million units of low- rental and other types of subsidized apartments in 2011.

The government previously rolled out a series of tightening measures, but property prices remain high since 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis as large amounts of speculative capital stayed in the property market.

The National Bureau of Statistics of China reported last month that under its readjusted calculation system, prices of new properties in the country's 70 major cities continued to rise in January.

Ten of the 70 surveyed cities reported increases of more than 10 percent from a year ago, the National Bureau of Statistics said. Six cities also saw second-hand home prices go up by at least 10 percent.

In Beijing alone, one square meter in a new apartment sold for an average of 20,000 yuan last year. But the square meter price for apartments within the Fourth Ring Road, the urban area, exceeded 34,000 yuan (about 5,151 U.S.dollars), more than 10 times the monthly income of an average Beijing resident.