CRI听力:Ongoing Public Housing Projects in China

The ten million affordable apartments promised by the government earlier this year is considered to be a grand project benefiting low income families in China. The goal exceeded the actual number of commercial houses sold last year across the country, which was nine million in total.

Now many citizens are asking how the project is going. The Minister of Housing and Urban Rural Development Jiang Weixin has revealed that the government is trying its best to push forward the construction across the country.

"I can't say there aren't any projects that have just started recently, but mainly, the major projects across the country have already been launched. We'll have three million apartments at least for low income families to move in to by the end of the year."

Sometimes it's easy to see a project start, but it takes a long time for it to finish. It can be delayed either by local governments or real estate developers due to various reasons.

So how can the central government make sure the construction phase will be finished on time? The government is emphasizing the requirement that the ten million apartments must at least have their foundations constructed by the end of this November and the entire project will need to be finished and put into use in one or two years. Qi Ji is the Vice Minister of Housing and Urban Rural Development.

"Our citizens care about the progress of these projects. The central government requires that the local government should publicize the local basic housing construction information to the public. The State Council together with our Ministry has already started to check those projects to see their progress."

The quality of the houses is also proving to be a big concern for the public. For example, an affordable housing project in Luzhou, Sichuan Province was found to be a failure last year. The residents could even dig a hole in their living room floor with their keys. These kinds of problems are also prevalent in many other cities throughout the country.

Some deputies of the National People's Congress, acting on behalf of citizens, have harshly questioned the quality of these projects at a recent conference of the Standing Committee of the legislative body.

"We can't cut corners on the construction of these houses just because they are built for the poor people, neither can we reduce the basic facilities required in the house."

"A good quality project has to be secured with sufficient funds. For example, a one thousand yuan per square meter house is quite different in quality compared to a three thousand yuan one."

Qi Ji says the central government has special requirements to guarantee construction quality.

"We ask every apartment building to publicize parties responsible for the project, including the titles of the real estate developer and the construction team, the names of the supervisor and the designer. Once the house is found to have a quality issue, then the supervisory department of the central government will ask these parties to take full responsibility and they also need to face punishments."

The government is also encouraging local residents to take an active role in monitoring the quality of the houses and once they find a problem they can report it to the supervisory department of the local government or the central government.
At the same time, the country is also building up a data base to include every household's property information. The government says this is to make sure the affordable houses can be fairly distributed to those in real need. It still needs time to fully establish such a system in the whole country. Now five provinces are in their trial phases of testing the system.

For CRI, I'm Liu Min.