CITY lawmakers have urged the government to ban the resale of the subsidized homes at a review meeting of the standing committee of the Municipal People s Congress on a draft revision of the cheap housing regulation, Chinese-language media reported yesterday.
Subsidized housing should belong to the city government forever, said Wang Daping, one of the lawmakers at the session. They shouldn t be traded in market. The issue concerns a lot of people. The government-subsidized homes should be for people who need them.
Wang s opinion was echoed by another lawmaker, Wu Zijun. The low-cost homes are built for low-income people who need a home to live in, but it doesn t seem so at the moment, said Wu, referring to some people who apply for a government home though they are living in expensive housing estates.
The revision, which was handed to the standing committee of the MPC for review Friday, was aimed at curbing rampant fraud in cheap housing applications.
The revision proposes to raise fines for applicants falsifying documents to up to 200,000 yuan (US$30,769). The existing regulation imposes only a 5,000-yuan fine in addition to banning offenders from reapplying for three years.
It is widely perceived that the penalties are far too light to be a deterrent. Some ineligible people took the risk of being fined only 5,000 yuan to bet on a cheap home which they could resell it for a lucrative profit.
Under the revised regulation, offenders would also be deprived of the right to apply for any kind of government housing for life.
The lawmakers said banning the resale of cheap government homes would effectively curb cheating because people would remove the incentive for profit.
Government subsidized housing has been plagued with fraud since it was launched several years ago. Applicants on eligibility lists have been found falsifying financial statements and lying about their family assets. Some were found to own companies and luxury cars. (SD News)
