HOREA proposes more preferential policies for social housing projects
The HCM City Real Estate Association (HOREA) believes that in addition to focusing on removing procedural obstacles, the city proposes that the Government need to supplement or increase preferential policies for social housing investors.
According to HOREA, to promote the implementation of social housing projects, contributing to increasing the supply of social housing, the first difficulty is to remove obstacles to construction investment procedures of social housing. Currently, social construction procedures are much more difficult than commercial housing construction procedures.
Procedural problems are one of the biggest reasons why the country's social housing development results in the 2016-20 periods only reached about 41 per cent of the plan. Among them, the City has reached 75 per cent of the plan. However, the actual number was only 15,000 social housing units, not meeting the city's huge social housing needs.
Similarly, in the period 20212023, the country only completed 72 social housing projects with 38,128 units, which reached 8.5 per cent of the five-year plan 20212025 of 446,000 units.
Meanwhile, the City has only completed and put into use two social housing projects with 623 units and has started construction on seven social housing projects with 4,996 apartments, but due to legal procedures, it is nearly as if construction could not be carried out.
Social housing projects where businesses create their own land funds also encounter legal procedures.
This results in blocking almost all investment approval procedures. This is the first procedure; if investors cannot follow this procedure, all subsequent construction investment procedures will be blocked.
From the above reality, HOREA recommends that the Government urgently focus on immediately removing legal obstacles in investing social housing projects.
Regarding land funds for social housing development, HOREA recommends that localities fully allocate land funds for social housing development to select capable investors and effectively exploit and use the allocated land funds to develop social housing, overcoming the situation of wasting land resources as happened before.
To attract businesses to invest in social housing, HOREA recommends adding or increasing preferential policies for investors of social housing projects to encourage and attract more investors.
HOREA proposed that the Government consider increasing the standard profit for investors of social housing projects from 10 per cent to 15 per cent in cases of businesses creating their own land funds by buying land from individuals and households to implement social housing projects.
In addition, regarding the issue of construction capital, the Government should consider allowing investors to mortgage the social
housing project itself after having a land fund, instead of having to mortgage another asset.
Instead of just building social housing for sale, the Government needs to consider leasing.
The sociological report of the City Labour Federation shows that about 60 per cent of migrant workers only need to rent a house with a rental cost of about 20 per cent of their monthly income for about 10-15 years and then return to their hometown.
To meet the rental needs of workers, the city currently has about 60,000 individuals and households investing in more than 560,000 boarding houses for rent. This contributes to solving the housing rental needs of more than 1.4 million immigrant workers.
From this reality, the Government needs to consider supplementing credit support policies for these landlords to build new, expand and upgrade boarding houses to serve rented workers.