Inner Mongolia buildings raise concerns about social housing construction quality

Substandard walls were found at a residential project for shantytown dwellers in Inner Mongolia’s Baotou city, highlighting doubts about the construction quality of social housing programs in China, state media reported. The 1.2 million square-meter project, developed by Shenhua Group Corp, contains 226 buildings and can accommodate 39,000 people, in addition to a school and a hospital. According to 451 families living at the buildings – which were finished in 2010 – the surface of their walls have been cracking and peeling off. While China has sped up the construction of low-cost housing projects in recent years – another 10 million apartments will be built this year – media reports have said that some projects have been shoddily built or put up in remote places. A subsidized housing project in Wuhan was found in December 2010 to have been built on land polluted by a chemical plant that once occupied the site.