Ha Noi tackles student housing problems
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The capital will launch projects to build such dormitories for some 100,000 students next month. |
The capital will launch projects to build dormitories for 100,000 students next month, according to Vice Chairman of the municipal People’s Committee Phi Thai Binh.
More than VND600 billion (US$33 million) has been earmarked by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung in 2009 for the projects.
A total of 3.7ha in Thanh Tri District, and a similar same area in Tu Liem District, will be used for such constructions, which will break ground in September.
These projects will provide rooms for more than 40,000 students in the first stage.
Construction of accommodations for the rest of the 60,000 students will be carried out after the city finds space in other areas such as Hoai Duc District and north of the Red River.
The capital will try its best to finish these projects by June 2011.
This was a response to the fact that there was a severe lack of space for students from other provinces who came to study at universities and colleges in the capital, said deputy director of the city’s Department of Construction Nguyen Quoc Tuan.
Ha Noi has 59 universities and academies, 28 colleges and 39 vocational training schools. Most of the city’s dormitories were built in the 1960s and 70s, and have degraded over time. These dormitories can only meet the demands of 18 per cent of the students in the city.
The Ha Noi University of Agriculture has 12,000 students in need of dormitory rooms, and can only accommodate 3,500.
The Foreign Trade University was in a similar situation. According to rector Hoang Van Chau, the university’s dormitories could only provide rooms for 500 students, accounting for 5 per cent of the demand.
Vice rector of Ha Noi Technology University Tran Van Top said that the school could only meet one-fourth of its students’ demands.
According to statistics supplied by the Ministry of Construction, only 20 per cent of students nationwide were able to stay at university or college dormitories.
High prices
Because of these reasons, students from other provinces have to look for other places to live outside of the dormitories.
Last year, a 10sq.m boarding house was rented out at a price of VND500,000 ($27) per month. Students were hardly able to find any boarding houses for the same price this year, said Vu Trang, a first year student at the Academy of Journalism and Communications.
Trang had to pay a deposit and VND700,000 ($38) per month for a 10sq.m boarding house, but when she returned from her home in Hai Phong City after break, the landlord said the price had to be increased to VND800,000 ($43).
Trang was still luckier than many other students, some of whom couldn’t even find a place to stay.
Nguyen Minh Quyet, from Dai Tu, Thai Nguyen Province, said that he had been searching for a boarding house for a week now but had not yet found one.
“The prices are too high for the ones I like, and for those with reasonable prices, the conditions are bad,” he said.
The price of a 10sq.m house was now from VND1 million ($57) to VND1.2 million ($68), Quyet said.
According to Nguyen Thu Huong, Secretary of Hoa Binh University’s Youth Union, the university had a policy to support new students by finding boarding houses for them. This was not an easy task, since cheap boarding houses were quite rare these days.
Huong said that sometimes when a student came in the morning to rent a boarding house for VND1.5 million ($83) per month and deposited half of the money, the landlord would return the cash if they could find someone to pay VND2 million ($111).
Meanwhile, many other students had been deceived during their boarding house searches.
Nguyen Tien Cong, from Thuan Thanh, Bac Ninh Province, said he and his son were deceived three times by centres offering boarding house services.
Lost money
He had to pay VND100,000 ($5.7) at each centre. At the first place, the house was nothing like the advertisement, which said that it was a 20sq.m house for VND1.5 million ($83), but which turned out to be a 15sq.m one that was humid and dark.
For the second place, the landlord was not home, and the same thing happened with the third. He lost his money for nothing.
This situation was common in some other big cities as well.
HCM City’s universities and colleges can only meet 17 per cent of students’ needs for dormitories.
Most Da Nang universities and colleges can provide dormitories for only 15 to 30 per cent of their students.
This led Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung to spending VND8 trillion ($444 million) on building dormitories for students in the next two years.
Source:english.vietnamnet.vn
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