After site clearance for the Xuyen Tam canal renovation project, 41 super-thin houses have appeared in Gia Dinh ward alone.
In addition to making the city ugly, what is worrying is that these projects are difficult to meet the minimum standards of lighting, ventilation, usability, power supply, water supply and drainage, fire prevention and fighting and structural safety.
Many households do not agree to recover the entire remaining land because it is still their legal property. Current law also does not have a mechanism to allow the State to compulsorily recover land plots that are too small just because they are no longer suitable for construction.
This legal loophole makes the government confused, and people keep the meager land to build houses to live in.
People are not wrong when protecting their legal property.
But if the policy only stops at recovering a part of the land and leaving behind plots of land of a few square meters, then clearly the planning problem has not been completely solved.
Urban embellishment cannot only complete the task of the State of opening roads and dredging canals, while the consequence is left to the people to fend for themselves.
What needs to be recognized is that super-thin houses are not the cause, but the consequence of an incomplete mechanism.
Experts have pointed out many noteworthy solutions.
First of all, it is necessary to clearly stipulate the minimum area of the remaining land after clearance. Land plots that do not meet the conditions for construction must have a mechanism to recover the entire land with a satisfactory compensation policy, instead of allowing distorted houses to arise and exist for decades.
Along with that is the mechanism of plot consolidation, block consolidation, and land swap between adjacent households to form land plots that meet construction standards.
This is a solution that both ensures the rights of people and helps to use urban land funds effectively.
Another important issue is that resettlement policies must be attractive enough.
If people have access to apartments with suitable areas, reasonable selling prices, credit support and long-term installments, they will have more choices instead of trying to keep a few square meters of land to build a house that does not guarantee living conditions.
More importantly, urban design must go one step ahead.
Right from the time of establishing a project to renovate canals or open roads, functional agencies must calculate all land plots that will be divided, cases with the risk of developing super-thin houses to develop a synchronous handling plan.
If the gap in compensation, resettlement and handling of micro-land plots is not filled, after each renovation project, more micro-thin houses will appear.
