Anne Zhang

    zhangy49@gmail.com

    AS an increasing number of its population turns old, Shenzhen has to look for different ways to care for the elderly.

    The city has about 450,000 permanent residents aged 60 or older, and the senior population is expected to reach 1 million by 2020, according to Shenzhen’s Civil Affairs Bureau.

    However, the city has only 31 public and private nursing homes and 20 community daycare centers for the elderly, providing a total of 5,766 beds.

    “As a young city, Shenzhen failed to foresee a huge demand for elderly services during its initial development. So the current facilities can hardly catch up with the growing aged population,” Zhang Yufan with the Shenzhen Social Welfare Center said.

    Compared with many other Chinese cities, Shenzhen lags far behind in the development of the elderly service industry, Zhang said. Shanghai, for example, has more than 700 nursing homes, about half of which are privately owned. A facility can register for operation in Shanghai if it has 10 beds, he said.

    The Shenzhen municipal government issued guidelines last year that encourage private or foreign capital to invest in the city’s elderly care industry.

    Private investors, including Citic Real Estate and Vanke, are tapping into the market. Three private nursing homes are planned for construction within the year.

    The city should help private nursing homes fill in their vacant beds before establishing new facilities, Li Ding with the city’s Association for the Elderly said.

    The association proposed increasing the monthly subsidy for private nursing homes from 200 yuan per bed to 1,500 yuan per bed.

    Xiao Youmei, a city lawmaker, suggested earlier in the year that Shenzhen should allow converting some of the houses built by villagers on collectively owned land that are ineligible for a State certificate of property ownership into nursing facilities for the elderly.

    The city’s land planning commission said it would choose some buildings and upgrade them into nursing homes after classifying and confirming the ownership of the buildings.

    The commission has proposed rules that would enable investors to build nursing homes on government reserved lands, farmlands and lands that become vacant after urban transformation.