(Yicai Global) Aug. 31 -- China’s hi-tech metropolis of Shenzhen will adopt a public housing scheme similar to Singapore’s to allow less better-off residents get their foot on the property ladder, according to the director of the Shenzhen Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau.

Shenzhen, which has some of the fastest rising house prices in the country, will strive to resettle 60 percent of its residents in housing leased or sold by the government over the next five to eight years, Zhang Xuefan said on Aug. 28. In this way it can ease the contradiction between demand and supply and stabilize the real estate market, he added.

The city is proposing a large-scale housing construction campaign of 1.1 million commercial and public units and has set the goal of building 100,000 homes for rent each year, he added. It also plans to increase the average living space per person to 30 square meters from 27.8 square meters by 2025, he said.

Singapore launched its Home Ownership Scheme in 1964 to encourage low- to middle-income groups to buy or lease flats built by the Housing Development Board. By doing so, it was able to encourage wealthier tenants to leave and make way for families with greater need, and to provide an opportunity for those unable to buy in the private sector to own a home. By 2016, some 82 percent of Singaporean citizens lived in a HDB flat.

In the 40 years since Shenzhen was designated a Special Economic Zone, its population has swelled 42 times to 13.44 million. Yet only 22.6 percent of the city’s total available land is used for residential purposes. This is much lower than the national minimum standards of between 25 percent and 40 percent.

Shenzhen has led the housing boom nationwide with house prices gaining roughly 1.6 percent month on month from March to May, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics based on surveys of residential house sales across 70 medium-sized and large cities. March prices saw a 9.7 percent gain year on year which increased to 12 percent in May.

Shenzhen’s gross domestic product has jumped 10,000-fold to CNY2.69 trillion (USD392.5 billion) from CNY169 million over the past 40 years.

Editor: Kim Taylor