HCM City (VNA) – Improving the capacity, reach and efficiency of its urban transport system is an imperative for Ho Chi Minh City to develop a housing programme to meet increasing demand, experts said at a recent seminar.
Given its rapidly increasing population, HCM City has suffered a serious housing shortage for several years now.
However, the development of housing projects has met with many difficulties, one of which is the under-developed transport system which limits access to areas and inhibits investors.
According to the HCM City Department of Planning and Architecture (HDPA), the inner city now has about one million houses with a combined floor space of 65 million sq.m. Around 300,000 citizens live in makeshift houses.
The housing problem has become urgent for the nation’s commercial hub with a rapid increase in low-income earners for more than two decades now.
The municipal government has taken several measures to tackle the issue, but they have proved ineffective due to obstacles in granting construction licences, construction management inefficiencies and inadequate infrastructure systems including roads, water and electricity.
Le Anh Duc of the HCM City Architecture University says many investors want to develop large-scale housing construction projects in the city centre, because of the location, and availability of infrastructure like roads, power and water supply systems.
However, the current infrastructure, including the transport system, will no longer be able to support the large increases in population that such projects will entail.
This has forced the municipal authorities to refuse permission for some of these projects, Duc said.
To settle the transport-related problems, many experts suggest that the city is divided into four clear areas: the core central zone, the old urban zone, the new urban zone, and outskirts.
For the core central zone, the city government should not allow new housing projects since the population density there was already very high, and land that could be used for developing public projects including the road system was very limited.
Therefore, the city should focus on upgrading main roads in the old urban zone, creating favourable conditions for large-scale housing construction projects to develop in the area.
Investors looking to develop housing projects in the new urban areas should be required to build road systems that will link the areas with the old urban zones, the experts said.
In the outskirts of the city, district-level administrations should be responsible for comprehensive development of their localities.
The experts stressed that housing development in districts must be based on the capacity of local transport systems. In other worlds, local transport networks need to be developed in parallel with the development of housing projects.-Enditem
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