Poor victims cheated out of housing
By Jane Chen |
April 21, 2010, Wednesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
GOVERNMENT workers in a north China city are accused of taking sponsored low-budget homes for needy people as their own and trading them to gain nearly 56 million yuan (US$8.2 million) in profits.
All 1,600 homes in the first phase of the 2,300-flat Century Park property project in Shanxi Province's Xinzhou City had been distributed to local government workers as so-called "welfare housing" rather than to designated low-income residents, Xinhua reported.
With a government investment of 670 million yuan, the homes were sold to the workers at 2,318 yuan per square meter, compared with the normal market price of 3,200 yuan for neighboring projects.
Data from city real estate agents indicated more than 800 such homes were resold by the workers, each netting a profit of about 70,000 yuan.
That means the homes could have brought 56 million yuan in profits.
As a government-sponsored low- budget housing project, the homes were designated to be sold to local needy families whose income rated from 80 percent to 120 percent of the city's average and whose per-capita living spaces were under 80 percent of the city's average.
To reduce the housing costs, up to 70 percent of the cheap homes must be smaller than 90 square meters.
But few of the government workers getting the homes were that poor and none of the homes was that small, local residents said.
Xu Chaohua, a worker with the Xinzhou Personnel and Social Security Bureau, who is asking a local agent to help sell a 94sqm home in the project, said he already had two other homes in the downtown city area, each of more than 100sqm.
He is asking 330,000 yuan for a home he bought for 200,000 yuan.
He said many government employees in the city starting work before June 2006 had been offered a home in the project.
These homes range in size from 94sqm to 144sqm.
Xinzhou government data indicated the city's residents earned an average income of 9,501 yuan in 2007 with per-capita living spaces of 25sqm. In 2008, 23,992 families had per-capita living spaces that were smaller than 10sqm.
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