HCM City authorities have urged district authorities and the Sai Gon Real Estate Corporation to boost the progress of relocating and resettling 15,000 households living in slums alongside or on rivers and canals.

In 2006, the committee decided to relocate 15,000 households living in slums along urban canals like Nhieu Loc – Thi Nghe, Tan Hoa – Lo Gom, Tham Luong – Ben Cat, Vam Thuan by April next year.

However, the programme has only relocated and resettled about 50 per cent of the households so far, the Sai Gon Tiep Thi (Sai Gon Marketing Magazine) has reported.

Binh Thanh District, for instance, plans to relocate a total of 3,046 households by the end of next year, but only 253 households have moved.

Most of these 253 households were displaced because of the construction of other infrastructure facilities, and they had no other choice.

A project to prevent land erosion along the Thanh Da canal in Binh Thanh District, for example, has relocated 161 households under the 2006 programme.

Addressing the HCM City People’s Council’s 17th session held early this month, Nguyen Thanh Tai, deputy head of the city People’s Committee, said the task of relocating slum households along rivers and canals faced several difficulties.

Lack of investor interest was a major obstacle because the programme does not have a land fund for resettlement like other projects, Tai said.

The city stopped granting State budget funds for the programme since early 2008, slowing down the programme further, according to the City Department of Construction.

While the city administration has called for private investment into these projects, several have been suspended because of capital shortage and no policy has been issued to attract investors, according to district authorities.

Nguyen Ho Hai, deputy chairman of District 8 People’s Committee, said that the decision to stop State funding for the programme was taken at a time when the global economic crisis hit, freezing the real estate market. So it was very difficult to get private investors interested in the programme.

District 8 has the largest number of households to be relocated under the programme, at 10,500.

To solve the problem of land shortage for resettlement, District 8 authorities have planned to relocate slum households gradually, one project at a time. When the relocation of one set of households is completed, the land that has been vacated will be used to build resettlement houses for the next project.

The city has about 1,800km of rivers and canals which are managed by several agencies, but due to the lax management, tens of thousands of migrant households have illegally built slum houses along or on river and canals over the past years.

VietNamNet/VNS