Municipal government of Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province, will fulfill its promise
to provide affordable housing in the form of low-cost apartments
and low-rent homes for impoverished families, said Huang Ting, vice
chief of the municipal land resources and housing management
bureau.
In the next five years, the city will set aside an additional 60
hectares of land for the development of 25,000 affordable
apartments, and 6,000 of them will be ready for sale or rent this
year, Huang said at a press conference on the sidelines of the
ongoing MPC annual session.
The arrangements to provide housing for the needy will help
control the overheated property market, Huang said.
"As we all know, the sky-rocketing housing prices in recent
years have aggravated public concern. But the government can't set
ceiling for prices by administrative means because they are decided
by market," Huang said.
To control the housing prices, Shenzhen has, in accordance with
the Central Government's regulation, increased taxes and taken land
and property development measures to guide the growth of the
property market. The measures are designed to adjust the housing
supply structure to make more inexpensive apartments available for
low-income families.
In addition, the bureau will tighten its control over the idle
land purchased by real estate developers.
Inspections carried out by the bureau last year found that 359
plots of land, totaling around 10 square kilometers in total, were
lying unused in the city.
Developers will have to pay 20 percent of the land's value in
"idle land fee" annually, if they could not start development
within the time stipulated in contract.
If a plot of land had been lying idle for two years or more, the
bureau will confiscate the land.
(Shenzhen Daily March 23, 2007)