HCM City's boarding houses must meet new requirements for safety

The entrance to the boarding house in HCM City's Bình Tân District is less than a meter wide. Photo tuoitre.vn

HCM CITY—The HCM City Department of Construction expects that boarding houses for rent in the City must meet requirements to continue operating, such as ensuring a minimum floor area of five square metres per person, being located in at least a four-metre wide alley, being no more than 100 metres from the main road, and having an emergency exit.

According to the Department of Construction, regulating the minimum floor area helps limit the number of people in boarding houses and the number of boarding houses in each area. This will ensure that the number of people gathering is not too large, reducing the risk of fires and accidents.

Having an alley at least four metres wide and no more than 100 metres from the main road will help people evacuate and facilitate rescue in cases of fire, natural disaster or emergency.

The city plans to apply those criteria in areas with a large concentration of boarding houses before applying them throughout the city.

According to the Department's statistics, the entire city has about 60,500 boarding houses. Independently built boarding houses account for 34,800 rooms, with a total maximum number of tenants of more than 943,000 people. Private housing divided into rooms for rent, accounting for 25,670 rooms, have a maximum number of tenants of more than 486,000 people.

About 12,800 boarding houses (accounting for 21 per cent) do not meet safety requirements to continue operating.

Of these, about 4,600 boarding houses do not meet the criteria for minimum average floor area and 8,200 boarding houses do not meet the criteria for fire prevention and fighting.

According to the department, these boarding houses must make the conversion to meet standards if they want to continue operating.

In addition, the department's surveys also show that the demand for rental accommodation of immigrant workers with an area from 15 square metres to 25 square metres accounts for more than 80 per cent with a rental price of VNĐ3-5 million (US$120-200) per month.

These surveys also show that the safety of people living in boarding houses is not guaranteed in terms of fire prevention, firefighting, environmental sanitation and domestic water safety.

The department also proposed that the City have a policy to support landlords to borrow at preferential interest rates to meet the safety level of regulations. If the landlords have boarding houses that do not meet the conditions, the city will offer support loans. – VNS