Municipal government of Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province, will fulfill its promise to provide affordable housing in the form of low-cost apartments and low-rent homes for impoverished families, said Huang Ting, vice chief of the municipal land resources and housing management bureau.

In the next five years, the city will set aside an additional 60 hectares of land for the development of 25,000 affordable apartments, and 6,000 of them will be ready for sale or rent this year, Huang said at a press conference on the sidelines of the ongoing MPC annual session.

The arrangements to provide housing for the needy will help control the overheated property market, Huang said.

"As we all know, the sky-rocketing housing prices in recent years have aggravated public concern. But the government can't set ceiling for prices by administrative means because they are decided by market," Huang said.

To control the housing prices, Shenzhen has, in accordance with the Central Government's regulation, increased taxes and taken land and property development measures to guide the growth of the property market. The measures are designed to adjust the housing supply structure to make more inexpensive apartments available for low-income families.

In addition, the bureau will tighten its control over the idle land purchased by real estate developers.

Inspections carried out by the bureau last year found that 359 plots of land, totaling around 10 square kilometers in total, were lying unused in the city.

Developers will have to pay 20 percent of the land's value in "idle land fee" annually, if they could not start development within the time stipulated in contract.

If a plot of land had been lying idle for two years or more, the bureau will confiscate the land.

(Shenzhen Daily March 23, 2007)