Ho Si Kiep, 74, a resident in North Linh Dam New Urban Area in Hoang Mai District said his family moved into their 230 sq.m-villa six years ago but they still did not have tap water or power in their neighbourhood.

His family was particularly unhappy that they did not have a road leading up to their home other than a muddy path running through a vegetable garden, Kiep said, adding that travel was harder at night because there was no lighting system and all their vehicles had to be parked in a nearby apartment building.

Four other households who spent tens of billions of Vietnamese dong to own villas in the area were in a similar situation.

In Ha Dong District's Mo Lao New Urban Area, residents still don't have tap water or a power supply system even though they moved in two years ago.

One local resident said her family finally installed tap water at the end of last year and her house was only connected to the electrical grid last month.

The Mo Lao New Urban Area project was approved in 2004 but pavements are still incomplete and road linkages to main streets including Nguyen Trai Street and Le Van Luong Street are still just scribbles on paper.

Head of the project management board Tran Thi Luong An said the project's sub-contractors had not synchronised their work and slow land clearance had delayed construction.

Last year, the Ha Noi People's Committee approved a detailed plan for the Phu My Apartment Building Project in Tu Liem District which was planned to cover 10 ha and be home to 7,700 people. Vice chairman of the district People's Committee Nguyen Kim Vinh said there were no schools included in the plan.

"The situation will be worse in the future because local public schools faced overloading," he said.

Deputy Minister of Construction Nguyen Tran Nam said many investors focused solely on selling houses instead of investing in social infrastructure to serve the essential daily needs of residents which led to a lot of trouble and burdens on residents and local authorities.

An inspection of 18 urban area projects in Ha Noi by the ministry's Housing and Real Estate Management Department in April showed that only four urban areas including Dinh Cong, Trung Yen, Thang Long International Village and Ciputra were well-populated thanks to their relatively sufficient infrastructure.

All of the inspected projects were approved between 1996-2006 and construction of most of them started no later than 2004, yet they are all progressing slowly.

For example, urban areas such as Mo Lao, Quang Minh 1, Quang Minh 2 have not completed construction of basic infrastructure such as housing, water and power systems, and transportation.

Others still lack public facilities including schools and hospitals even though people have resided in the areas for years.

Out of 2,700 newly-constructed villas in Ha Noi, about 900 remain incomplete or unused.

Deputy head of the department Vu Xuan Thien explained that unused houses and villas were built by speculators and owners hesitated to live there due to insufficient basic infrastructure.

Nguyen Huu Tuan, director of the construction firm VABIS Ha Noi Joint Stock Company, said that in the South, investors paid more attention to social and technical infrastructure in order to attract buyers.

This was possible in HCM City, for example, because there was a greater availability of empty or unused land to develop new urban areas than there was in Ha Noi meaning investors did not have as much trouble with land clearance, he said.

Meanwhile, due to the lack of drastic measures to solve land clearance issues, investors in Ha Noi continued to face difficulties because as the housing projects finished, the price for surrounding land to develop support facilities went up, leading to greater cost recovery needs.

Ha Noi People's Committee Chairman Nguyen The Thao, who is also an architect, admitted that the city's construction planning was still poor and it was necessary to clarify the rules for school and hospital construction in addition to housing.

The city is designing its urban construction and development plan for the 2011-15 period in which it targets adding 15,500 new social houses, accommodation for 41,000 students and about 230,000 houses for workers. In terms of infrastructure, the plan calls for 12 per cent of total urban land designated for transportation, seven sq.m of green space for each person and tap water access for all urban residents. 

Vietnam news