China accelerates public housing construction
About 56.6 percent of planned public housing programs around China began construction by the end of June, up 22 percentage points from one month ago, China Business News reported on Wednesday.
The report said there were 2 million new apartments started construction around the country during the past 30 days, and the quota for the whole year is 10 million, according to data provided by the public housing leading group of Jilin province.
Some provincial governments complained that a shortage of cash is the main difficulty of public housing. According to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, 10 million apartments require 1.3 trillion yuan ($201 billion) to 1.4 trillion yuan in investment, over 500 billion yuan of which will be paid by central and local governments. The local governments are to pay about 400 billion yuan.
It is a heavy pressure for local governments, which already have 10 trillion yuan in debts, the report said.
