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Elaine Chan

If Shanghai's Huangpu district with the famous waterfront Bund has the best land sites in the city, it also has the biggest headaches.

   The sites, carrying run-down houses that have no kitchens or sanitary facilities, are the most to buy expensive and the costliest to redevelop.

  'Although Huangpu district is only 4.1 square kilometres, it is one of the districts in the city with the biggest problem because it has the most old housing,' Zhou Shulin , senior urban planner and deputy director of the Huangpu planning and land administration bureau, said.

  Redeveloping the old areas has a high priority on the government's agenda. The district has 64.6 million square feet of housing cluttered between its congested roads.

  Of this, 21.5 million sq ft is what authorities classify as 'one and two types' where there are no sanitary facilities.

  Type one refers to housing with only coal supply, while type two includes houses with no facilities at all.

  'This essentially means residents live in 'shiku men' houses,' Mr Zhou said.

  A 'shiku men' house has a courtyard with four to five rooms. They were built in the early part of this century. As much as the government would like to preserve such examples of architectural heritage, the odds are against them.

  Mr Zhou said: 'Good shiku men houses, we want to refurbish them, but it is hard for us to go ahead with our plans due to the high costs involved.

    'As for the second type of housing, we will demolish all of them.'    The demolition of old buildings is an arduous task because for clearing every hectare, 800 to 1,000 residents have to be relocated. The population of Huangpu is 320,000. Not only would developers have to shoulder the demolition costs, they would also have to build new houses to resettle affected residents.

  The majority of Shanghai districts would use the funds obtained from leasing land-use rights to build resettlement flats.

  Huangpu district's importance as the administrative centre of Shanghai, where most government departments are housed, as well as the financial and commercial hub of the city, has not cushioned the blow from the downturn in the property market.

  From 1992 to last year, 20 hectares of land had been leased. Although a breakdown of land leased was not available, officials said no sites were leased last year due to poor market sentiment.

  The district now has 100 or more large-scale construction projects, representing about 215,280 sq ft to 322,920 sq ft.

   About half of the 100 or so buildings will have been completed by the end of the year.

  Experts have predicted that more than six million sq ft of commercial space will be available in the district by 1998.

  Yang Yunzhong , president of the Shanghai Gold Bund Group, one of the district's government-linked property developers, said: 'In terms of density for construction, our district is the highest in the city.'   He said one-third of real estate development in the district was undertaken by the group, accounting for investments of eight billion yuan (about HK$7.44 billion). It built about 2.2 million sq ft of gross floor area annually.

 Mr Yang said the district was undergoing its second phase of development in real estate.

  Huangpu district is divided into three parts.

  The first runs from the Bund to Henan Road and is known as the business district.

  The middle part is from Henan Road to Xizhang Road, which is the Central Commercial District and features the mainland's most famous shopping belt, Nanjing Road.

  The third and most westerly part of the district is the area between Xizhang Road and Chengdu Road. This is where the municipal government is located.

  While there is worry about an oversupply of commercial space in the district, a pressing problem is the shortage of car parking.

   The Shanghai City Comprehensive Transportation Planning Institute estimates that at least 10 multi-storey car parks will be needed in the densely populated district. It will cost more than in other districts for developers to build parking facilities as land lease rights are higher at between US$464.5 to $929 per sq ft.

  Mr Zhou said: 'Parking fees for the facilities here will be higher than anywhere else in the city.'   The city's Metro Line One runs through the district and has two stations. And with the planned Metro Line Two, it will have another two stations, one in the congested Nanjing Road.

  With the number of cars on the roads increasing by 10 per cent a year, Huangpu officials are considering underground pedestrian escalators and stricter traffic controls as solutions.



Rundown housing puts huge price tag on redeveloping prime sites