Residents from one of the city's major new low-cost housing projects are taking aim at the developer, claiming their homes were built with substandard materials.

Homeowners in the Qisheng Jiayuan development, in North Beijing's Changping district, which is reportedly the first low-cost housing aimed at low-income residents, said they found holes in walls and complained about a lack of cement.

"The balconies on three buildings are below standard," said Shi Jiuling, a new resident.

"A house owner wanted to drill a hole in the balcony earlier this year and the whole balcony collapsed."

Qisheng Jiayuan was finished at the end of June 2009 and many residents had moved in by the end of the year.

The complex was built for 4,600 low-income families.

"A total of 236 homes have quality problems and are defective," claimed Wang Jingyi, a professional home inspector, who told Shanghai's Mail Business Newspaper.

Wang Jinbo, a worker with Beiyu Property Company, which manages the community, said all the balconies have been remodeled and claimed cracks and damaged structures have been repaired.

The Beijing municipal commission of housing and urban-rural development declined to comment.

The commission recently released a regulation, saying developers responsible for substandard apartment projects for low-income people would be blacklisted, Beijing Youth Daily reported.

"The drainage pipes are often reported leaking, but to me, it is no big deal because it is so common," said a resident name Liu Lili.

Other residents said they were not surprised that the low-income building was allegedly low-quality.

"Since the house is low-rent housing, it is natural that the quality is low-class," said Zhang Jiayin.

"But the property company was trying to charge me 20,000 yuan for repair fees, even before I moved in. If I did not pay, I would have got my ownership certificate for the apartment."

Although some have paid the fee and received the ownership certificates, Zhang said she will keep on fighting.

Zhang attributed the poor quality of the buildings to the developers.

"It is low-rent housing. The developers can only make big profits by lowering their costs. When supervision from the construction departments are loose, the developers typically use inferior materials and do shoddy work," Zhang said.

The price of the low-rent housing is under 6,350 yuan per sq m while free-market apartments nearby sell for about 12,000 yuan, according to Mail Business Newspaper.

But another resident said the problems were connected to the 2008 Olympic Games, when much of the construction on the building was done. At the time, noisy cement mixers were prohibited.

"The mixing job was done by hand and it is hard to reach the required standard," the unnamed resident told Mail Business Newspaper.

Qisheng Jiayuan is not alone in being called a defective building. In June last year, a 13-story residential building under construction in Shanghai fell over.

Poor construction was blamed. And in Chongqing, developers were criticized for using wooden columns to support a shaky building.

(China Daily May 20, 2010)