Four Departments including the Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development ("MOHURD") have recently issued the Opinions on Further Regulating the Development of Public Rental Housing (the "Opinions").
The Opinions state that the basic security will be predominantly provided by the government, the access threshold shall be determined reasonably by category, and housing demands will be guaranteed by means of both physical houses and rent subsidies. The Opinions call for: 1. continuing to work effectively on guaranteeing houses available to urban and rural households haunted by housing problems that make earnings slightly below the average level or even lower; 2. ramping up efforts to guarantee the housing for qualified employees that just realize employment and do not own houses and for qualified migrant workers under the urban employment stabilization mechanism; 3. strengthening the management of the building and operation of public rental houses; and 4. putting in place various supportive policies. With respect to the forms and criteria of housing guarantee, the Opinions state that families with housing problems that live on subsistence allowances or earn very low income, and extraordinarily poor individuals that are dispersedly provided for, may be offered with physical rental houses in most cases and be granted rent subsidies on a few occasions, while families with housing problems that make earnings below the average level may be provided with rent subsidies in most cases and offered physical rental houses on a few occasions. Meanwhile, efforts will be made to find available houses in different ways, and cities under the pilot program on using collective construction land to build rental houses will be allowed to use rental houses built on the collective construction land as public rental houses for long-term leasing and ensure the rental period is no less than five years in general.