(Ecns.cn) – Affordable rental housing for the public is becoming an indispensible part of the subsidized housing system in China, as low-rent and price-fixed housing projects greatly ease the burden on less well-off urbanites.
On September 19, Premier Wen Jiabao presided over an executive meeting of the State Council, where he said the government will continue to increase subsidies to promote the construction of public rental housing in order to provide more affordable housing to the public. According to a statement posted on the official website of the central government, the projects will mainly focus on units measuring about 40 square meters each, with rents a little lower than market rates.
Since the release of guidelines on the development of public rental housing by seven ministries in June last year, the construction of public rental housing has spread like wildfire across the nation. However, many problems have been exposed in the process, resulting from a lack of uniform criteria concerning size, layout, rents and qualifications for applicants.
Size not clearly defined
According to the statement, the State Council encouraged local governments to build public rental housing units measuring about 40 square meters. It is the first time for the size of a public rental housing unit to be specified in detail. In the previous guidelines, the size was set at smaller than 60 square meters.
However, the State Council did not release a mandatory regulation, which means there is no new upper limit for the size of public rental housing units.
Though the local regulations of cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing require the construction of public rental housing to concentrate on small-sized apartments, some public rental units have reached or even exceeded 90 square meters.
A report in The Beijing News revealed that the Yicheng Mingyuan Community was one of the first batches of public rental housing communities in Beijing, which has been open since March 2011. The community was divided into two phases, namely X17R1 and X31F1. In the X31F1 project, 16 apartments are one-bedroom units measuring 74 square meters, while more than 2,000 apartments are two-bedroom units measuring 90 square meters.
The Beijing local government released a trial technical guideline for the construction of public rental housing in July 2010, in which it was regulated that the size of a public rental apartment should be between 30 and 60 square meters.
However, an official responsible for that project explained that the size of a public rental house could be adjusted for those with doctoral degrees, part of a policy to reduce brain drain.
In Chongqing, the size of a public rental unit is smaller than that in Beijing, the largest measuring less than 80 square meters, which still exceeds the regulated limit of 60 square meters.
