Empty homes in desert a sign of administrative indifference

A government-subsidized residential in Anhui province is under construction.[Photo/IC]

Hengshan country in North China's Shaanxi province built its largest government-subsidized residential community in Maowusu Desert, 40 kilometers from the downtown area, a few years ago. It remains largely unoccupied. Beijing Youth Daily commented on Monday:

Work on the 2,104-home community was finished several years ago. It has largely remained empty since then. Only 96 families live in it. The community has no public transport connections, no heating system, which is common in the north, and no schools or hospitals nearby.

The residents brought the real estate developer to court, who explained the government has not yet finished constructing the supporting facilities, although it had dug a well to provide for the residents' drinking water.

If it was a commercial residential building project, would the local government have acted so slowly? The residents, mostly low-income citizens, in the government-subsidized houses are no different from residents who can afford commercial houses in that they need basic facilities. Without the necessary facilities the public houses are almost meaningless. Governments should tilt more resources to low-income residents to ensure social justice and fairness.

The government has the power to decide where such residential communities should be built. But the quality, location and supporting facilities of most public housing developments are always inferior to commercial residential communities.

Building public houses is a task assigned to local governments by the central authority. The purpose of the task is not to please the central authority, but to serve local people. The residential community in a desert in Hengshan shows local county government's indifference to both people's practical needs and its own legal responsibility. What's the point of building some houses that people cannot and do not want to live in? It is a waste of public money.

The government should implement an accountability system according to the law to determine the practical effects of government-subsidized homes, which sometimes becomes a source of illegal income for officials, who take bribes or kickbacks from the developers as some corruption cases have shown.

The government-subsidized houses should have been examples of quality housing, as they are a testimony to a government's sense of responsibility to people at the lower end of society.