Qiao Jian, a secretary at a university in downtown Beijing where her husband is also on the support staff, has to rise before 6:00 AM if she wants to get to work on time. Her daily commute adds up to at least three hours.

She is one of 400,000 residents of the Huilongguan apartment community, Beijing's largest affordable apartment complex. It's located in northern Changping District, outside the Fifth Ring Road.

Technically speaking, she lives outside the central city, since that ring road is considered to be the "outer limits" of the urban area.

Qiao and her husband, both Beijingers, bought a three-bedroom affordable apartment six years ago for about 1,060 yuan (US$155) per square meter, less than half of the price of commercial housing at the time in that area.

"This type of apartment was affordable for us, and we can have extra rooms for my son and guests. But we have to commute a long way," she told Xinhua. After the long trip home from work, her first desire was just to lie down on the sofa, she said.

Many similar urban families in China have bought bigger and cheaper homes, as the country completed more than 60 million sq m of affordable apartments last year and helped 2.53 million low- and medium-income urban families solve their housing problems from2005 to 2008, Qi Ji, vice minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, told reporters in March at the Second Session of the 11th National People's Congress.

Like many other Chinese cities, Beijing has seen commercial home price hikes in recent years. Second-hand home prices have exceeded 18,000 yuan per sq m, on average, in Qiao's university area. Buying just 3 sq m of apartment space near her job would take her entire current annual income, but an affordable home in Huilongguan, even now, would be only about half of the downtown price.

Qiao takes Subway Line 13, transfers to Line 2, and then changes to a bus to get to her university outside the western Second Ring Road.

Transport expansion lags demand

"We don't want to sit in our car in a traffic jam, as the traffic from our community headed downtown is usually heavy during peak hours, so we normally avoid driving. We need to get on the subway at about 6:30, before it becomes unbearably crowded, to get to our offices before 8 a.m.," she said.

Although the municipal government spent more than 19.8 billion yuan in the first five months of this year, up 28.7 percent from a year earlier, on transportation, including roads and subways, the rush hour commute is still tough. There are more than 3.5 million cars in Beijing, and another 1,200 go on the road every day.

"My husband and I like to stay at work for an hour or so after quitting time before setting out for the subway, to avoid the crowds. You can get squeezed like a photo stuck in a photo album," she said.

"When we first moved to the area, there were no supermarkets nearby, so we had to get on the subway home in the evening with shopping bags full of food and daily necessities in both hands," Qiao said. But more retailers like Carrefour have appeared around the neighborhood in the past two years.

Residents in the neighborhood would also benefit from a branch of a big public hospital, the renowned Beijing Ji Shui Tan Hospital, which is set to open at the end of the year. The new hospital is to have 500 beds and receive 1,500 patients daily.