Lei Xiangping

    lagon235@163.com

    CHINA’S central and local governments have invested billions of yuan yearly in building affordable homes in the past five years, but many finished affordable houses remain empty, which not only has resulted in a huge waste of money and land resources but also made many low-income families wait on the long list for a new home.

    Recently, the National Bureau of Audit released a report after sampling five cities in five provinces, saying over 57,500 affordable homes in these cities are empty. Among them, Guiyang City of Guizhou Province has the highest empty rate, with over 30,000 affordable apartments unoccupied.

    According to China Central Television, Guiyang has spent over 8.5 billion yuan (US$1.35 billion) in building affordable houses, but they were not distributed to the right people in a timely fashion. When CCTV reporters approached the city bureau chief in charge of housing and urban-rural development for an interview, the chief even told the reporter he was not the chief.

    The CCTV report stirred up a fierce debate on the Internet, with many people asking one question: since affordable houses are specially built for low-income families, why haven’t local governments let them move in as soon as possible? As a result of public criticism, the Guiyang government sacked the bureau chief and apologized for its inability to distribute affordable houses to people in need.

    However, a dismissal and apology are not enough to deal with real problems. The Guiyang case is only the tip of the iceberg. According to an earlier report, there were over 9,000 empty affordable houses in nine cities in Hainan, 11,000 in 14 cities in Guangdong, 23,000 in Yunnan and 12,900 in nine cities in Shandong.

    Why is the empty rate so high while at the same time governments at different levels are stepping up endeavors to increase investment in building more affordable houses?

    One reason is that communities where affordable houses are built have inadequate infrastructure and are in remote locations. Some local governments should have approved some land lots, if not all, with good locations and mature infrastructure for building affordable houses. However, given that revenue from land sales in good locations are much higher than those with poor locations and infrastructure, local governments are not willing to do it.

    To name a few, the delayed construction in drainage, electricity, and transportation — because the government was unwilling to spend money on them — means that some affordable houses in Guiyang are almost unlivable. Also, the biggest affordable housing community in Jinan City, Shandong Province, completed in 2013, hasn’t attracted many low-income families because it is in a suburb. If low-income workers working in downtown areas choose to move in, their daily expenses for food, childcare and commuting will soar drastically, so they would rather stay in their tiny homes within the city.

    Another reason is that some local governments have established unreasonably strict standards to identify residents who qualify for affordable houses. Some local governments are proactive in applying more funds from the Central Government to build affordable houses, but are inactive, or cautious, in distributing them. Ironically, it was discovered that some officials owned dozens of affordable homes.

    In Jilin City of Jilin Province, only people making the minimum wage qualify for affordable housing. As a result, some communities with finished affordable houses are still empty because the number of qualified applicants still doesn’t meet the standard of starting the distribution procedure. In Dongguan, one community with 4,000 affordable houses only has several hundred residents; only a small number of people in the city qualify because the government has set the salaries of applicants too low.

    So many affordable houses are kept idle that some officials from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development are encouraging the Central Government to decrease investment in affordable houses, which is a dangerous signal.

    Despite the fact that China has finished 36 million affordable homes during the 12th Five-year Plan, lifting the affordable house coverage rate to 20 percent, it is still below the international standards of 25 percent to 40 percent. China’s Central Government plans to lift the coverage rate to 23 percent during the 13th Five-year Plan, and more money will be invested in building affordable houses.

    It is time for local governments to figure out how to distribute affordable houses fairly and build new affordable houses properly, making sure needy people have their own homes.

    (The author is a News Desk editor with China Radio International.)