More than 7,000 households in Beijing will be able to move into affordable apartments in the near future as construction of this year's largest government subsidized housing project began on Wednesday.
The 31.8-hectare project is located by the west Fifth Ring Road in Shijingshan district and will provide affordable homes to 7,277 families. The project is scheduled to finish by the end of 2012.
The cost of houses in the project has not been finalized. However Beijing News reported on Thursday that 3,160 apartments in the project will cost around 10,000 yuan per square meter while 4,117 apartments will cost around 6,500 per sq m.
The project in Shijingshan district is part of a government plan to help solve housing problems for low-income urban residents. All affordable housing applicants must be adults and be Beijing hukou (permanent residency) or Beijing household registration holders. Their salaries, savings and current living conditions must be within government-set guidelines.
In early 2010, the municipal government set a goal of building 136,000 government subsidized apartments and completing 46,000 of them by the end of this year.
Including the project in Shijingshan district, 109,000 such apartments are already under construction and 21,000 of them are ready to sell.
Chen Gang, vice-mayor of Beijing, said on Wednesday that there has been considerable progress in building affordable housing this year.
"But we still need to make sure that construction of all of the 136,000 apartments starts before September and that 46,000 are finished by the end of November," he said.
From 2007 to 2009, government-subsidized housing projects have housed around 200,000 low-income families.
According to a government regulation, at least 50 percent of land used to build residential communities should be specifically for subsidized homes.
But in Shijingshan district alone around 8,000 households that had successfully applied for affordable housing were still on the waiting list at the end of 2009, due to a shortage of available apartments.
According to Homelink Real Estate, 500,000 to 600,000 families look for new apartments in Beijing every year.
