VietNamNet Bridge - The accident of a child falling down due to the collapse of a staircase handrail in November is an additional reason for the city authorities to put Co Giang apartment building in HCMC’s District 1 into the black list of deteriorating condo buildings that can be dangerous to residents and can collapse at any time.

However, three years since the list was first approved, the scheme of replacing such deteriorating apartment buildings by modern multipurpose ones remains half done as the plan of removing existing residents living there has seen no progress.

At Co Giang condos, there are some 885 families living in four blocks of five-storey buildings and some row houses which are surrounded by the streets of Co Bac and Co Giang in the district. Those apartments were designed from 36 square meters each, but most of them, for different reasons, are divided into smaller parts and are all now fully occupied. There in the condo buildings, one can see the so-called apartments which are as small as 12 square meters, or some 22 square meters for a family of three or four people.

In fact, the municipal authorities have ordered the district government to compensate and to relocate those families before April 30 this year, as well as to pull down the four buildings to make the 14,500-square-meter site ready for a multipurpose building development to be developed by Viet Land Development Corporation at a cost of some VND1,300 billion.

In order to quicken the site clearance plan, the district authorities have informed the residents of the plan and promised financial support for relocation a few days ago. Under the plan, the project’s developer will offer a minimum compensation of VND25 million per square meter, and no less than VND750 million for any apartment though the actual size can be much smaller than 30 square meters.

The developer, however, still has to wait and see as many residents in the old buildings are still hesitant to make a move, with some even saying with such a sum of compensation, they hardly can find any other place to settle down.

In fact, Co Giang apartment is just one among many degraded apartments that the city authorities want to tear down to build new ones, but the program has been moving at a snail’s pace largely due to the tough challenge of compensation and site clearance.

According to the Ministry of Construction, there are some three million square meters of old buildings of all types around the country, among which there are some 200 old apartment buildings occupied by some 100,000 families, mostly in the two big cities of Hanoi and HCMC.

At present, HCMC has some 100 degraded apartments, and many of them, such as Nguyen Kim and Ngo Gia Tu apartments in District 10, have been planned for reconstruction for years but it has seen very little move in progress.

“The rebuilding program is very slowly deployed in some cities, falling far behind the target set for the past three years,” the construction ministry acknowledged in a recent statement. The ministry also suggests a new method for compensation, saying that residents can exchange their old apartments for a new one whose area is one and a half larger than the old one.

Source: SGD