Ho C hi Minh City, Vietnam
RENOVATION IN HOUSING FOR LOW INCOME EARNERS IN HCMC BY NGUYEN MINH HOA, PHUNG HAI DANG, NGUYEN HAI NGUYEN, LE CHI TAM, HOANG DUNG
INTRODUCTION Like many cities of developing countries in Asia, HCMC’s housing supply is seriously inadequate, with low income households bearing the brunt of the impact. In HCMC, low income households include minimum wage and salary earners (such as medium- or low-ranking State workers) and the urban poor (such as vendors, and day laborers). Average incomes for these groups may be as low as 1.5 USD - 2 USD/ day- at or only slightly above the poverty line. ere is a huge demand for low-cost apartments but the prices of such homes are still way beyond the nancial capability of most homebuyers. As a result, approximately 800,000 people (10% of city population) are without a home of their own, and live in substandard rental housing. A decade ago, slums were commonplace despite the efforts of the central government to alleviate the situation. Although the HCMC authority recognizes the challenge and has established a housing fund to rehabilitate existing homes, the
bene ts have been relatively limited. Unlike other cities in Asia, progress is hampered in HCMC by an obsolete ideology-based regulatory framework that constrains private sector participation. Until recently, private land ownership did not officially exist in Vietnam, so that the housing ‘market’ operated informally and outside the law. Lacking clear Party guidelines, government agencies at national level were reluctant to take the radical changes needed to address the mounting housing problems. However, since 1975 the private sector has been granted more freedom to operate in HCMC as a ‘regulated market economy’. As a consequence, innovative reforms and renovation policies launched in HCMC across many domains have tended to exert strong in uence on national policy. In the case of housing, the private sector
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