How to avoid becoming an image project when some characteristic towns are built and abandoned？
Dialogue motivation
Recently, the Development and Reform Commission of Henan Province, the Provincial Department of Land and Resources, the Provincial Department of Environmental Protection and the Provincial Department of Housing and Construction jointly issued the "Several Opinions on Standardizing and Promoting the Construction of Characteristic Towns and Small Towns", requiring all localities to build characteristic towns according to regional humanities and industrial foundations, and strictly control the tendency of real estate development of characteristic towns to avoid the embarrassment of "being abandoned when built".
How to avoid some problems in the past during the construction of characteristic towns? The reporter started a dialogue with industry experts in this regard.
Interlocutor
Professor Huang Kun, Economics Department, National School of Administration
Professor Yang Hongshan, School of Public Administration, Renmin University of China
"Legal Daily" reporter Du Xiao
Shi Weixin, Intern of Legal Daily
One-sided view of political achievements leads to the real estate of characteristic towns
Reporter: Henan issued relevant opinions to control the real estate development of characteristic towns, which caused the society to pay attention to the construction of characteristic towns. What negative effects will the phenomenon of real estate have?
Huang Kun: "Small town, big strategy". Characteristic town is an innovative development model of urbanization with the integration of production and city, an effective form of urbanization on the spot, and an important starting point for urbanization and urban-rural integration in China in the new era. In recent years, tourist towns, Internet of Things towns, robot towns, financial towns, new energy car towns, forest towns, agricultural Internet towns and entrepreneurial towns are all spectacular. Because characteristic towns are different from cities and rural areas, they are the natural combination and adhesive between cities and rural areas. Under the special background of the new era, the healthy and sustainable development of characteristic towns is conducive to promoting the integrated development between industries, production cities and urban and rural areas, and to implementing new urbanization, giving full play to the radiation-driven role of urbanization in rural development, promoting rural revitalization, and realizing the coordinated development of large, medium and small cities and small towns and urban and rural areas.
However, real estate has become the most prominent and common problem in the construction of characteristic towns. It is like a cancer, and its existence will inevitably lead to the risk of empty city, real estate, detachment from reality and debt. The existence of these four risks will not only make the characteristic town lose its ability to gather industry and population, but also seriously restrict the development of the real economy of the characteristic town, which will cause irreversible losses to the characteristic town and the whole local economic and social development.
Yang Hongshan: Real estate is an area that small towns want to develop. Characteristic towns are the advanced form of local urbanization. With the concentration of population, the town itself has the desire and demand to develop real estate, but the future of the town is gray only by relying on real estate development. Development can’t just rely on building houses. The development of small towns depends on characteristic industries. If we build characteristic towns with real estate, we will misunderstand the concept of characteristic towns.
The development of real estate in small towns is normal, but it needs to be compatible with the development of small towns. Characteristic town is a kind of excellent project. If only real estate is the main industry, is there any characteristic? In the early stage, the scale design was grand, but in the later stage, it was just an ordinary town. It is worth emphasizing that characteristic towns are a phenomenon in the advanced stage of urban development, and they must have characteristics and strong competitiveness industries.
Reporter: Real estate appeared during the construction of characteristic towns. How did this phenomenon come into being?
Huang Kun: There are subjective and objective reasons for the formation of real estate in the construction of characteristic towns. Subjectively, the one-sided view of political achievements and GDP development is the fundamental reason for the real estate construction of characteristic towns. In some places, people-oriented development ideas and innovative, green, coordinated, open and shared new development concepts are still not established, and the goal is still to pursue the quantitative expansion of GDP, with image project and face project as the starting point, and the chief executive’s will as the main way of resource allocation. Copying and simply copying foreign construction experience, greedy for big and quick, blindly developing, excessively pursuing quantitative goals and investment scale, violates the laws of urbanization and small town construction.
Objectively speaking, there are three important incentives for the real estate construction of characteristic towns. The first inducement is the simplicity of real estate and the dilemma of other industries. For many villages, the lack of characteristic natural and economic resources, the lack of necessary development foundation and the lack of financial guarantee for development means that it is difficult to find the breakthrough of industrial development and the development path of urbanization according to the conventional development model. However, the development mode of real estate is simple and easy. As long as it is bold enough and supported by enterprises, it can break through the bottleneck of development, and simply rely on land and capital operation routines to build a new park, new district and new city efficiently and quickly.
The second inducement is the continuous rise of real estate prices and the continuous growth of demand for house purchase and land purchase. Since the market-oriented reform of real estate, the price of real estate has been rising unilaterally, which makes it a common social expectation. Although the housing market in third-and fourth-tier cities and small towns has been in a state of oversupply, compared with other industries, the demand has continued to grow, and the return on investment in the real estate market is still high, which makes the government and enterprises still enthusiastic about developing real estate.
The third incentive is the continuous expansion of the local fiscal expenditure gap. On the one hand, infrastructure, public services, poverty alleviation and other aspects need more fiscal expenditure, on the other hand, economic growth and fiscal revenue growth in many places, especially at the county and township levels, have slowed down significantly, and the gap in local fiscal expenditure has continued to widen. Under such circumstances, many places have no choice but to obtain more fiscal revenue through real estate.
The construction of characteristic towns faces four bad tendencies.
Reporter: In addition to real estate, what problems still exist in the process of building characteristic towns?
Huang Kun: In addition to the problem of real estate, there are four bad tendencies in the process of building characteristic towns.
First, blindly follow the trend and be eager for success. Some places are eager to produce results and achievements, regardless of the actual situation of poor resources and weak economic foundation, blindly follow the trend and completely ignore the objective reality of the construction foundation, operation cycle and investment scale of characteristic towns. Some places are greedy for perfection, engage in image projects and performance projects, and target the construction of characteristic towns, requiring lower-level governments to complete them, emphasizing quantity over quality, which violates the law of economic development.
Second, lack of characteristics, lack of industrial support. Some places blindly copy and copy, fail to dig deep into local characteristic industries, are vague about regional resource endowments and cultural connotations, lack creativity in simple imitation and rote copying, and engage in "big platter and hodgepodge". As a result, characteristic towns are empty in name but not strong in characteristics, their industrial positioning is vague, and there is no substantial resource support, regardless of regional development foundation and industrial characteristics. The integration and development of production and city has become empty talk, and the business model is unsustainable.
Third, the market-oriented mechanism is insufficient and the development sustainability is lacking. Many characteristic towns are established under the leadership of the government, more just to meet the will and assessment requirements of the government, rather than to meet the needs of consumers or the market. The characteristic towns built in this way are congenitally insufficient, can not be responded or sought after by the market, and it is difficult to absorb more market subjects and population, and it is difficult to develop sustainably in the future.
Fourth, the planning is not perfect, and the later management and operation are lagging behind. In some local town planning, there are some phenomena, such as the will of the chief executive, repeated planning, single form, lack of overall planning, and inadequate elements of mining resources. There are double contradictions in characteristic towns, such as superior multi-head management, imperfect supervision and management mechanism and shortage of management institutions and talents at the same level, which lead to many places going astray and deviating from the original intention. Many characteristic towns lack operational ideas, and place their hopes on preferential policies such as tax incentives, financial subsidies, and land inclination.
How to make the construction of characteristic towns run healthily
Reporter: What measures should be taken to avoid the real estate construction of characteristic towns?
Yang Hongshan: From a national perspective, it is necessary to formulate relevant policies to require small towns to strictly control the real estate land use indicators. Bidders with distinctive names and real estate operations make waves, which will not only raise housing prices, but also affect the cost of the real economy and have a negative effect on the development of small towns. Drawing lessons from the past, we can’t let real estate develop. Local governments should review policy issues, support those towns with real characteristic projects that have reached a certain stage of urbanization, and reverse the rush to build characteristic towns.
Reporter: In view of the importance of the construction of characteristic towns, what principles should be adhered to in the long run?
Huang Kun: In order to ensure that the construction of characteristic towns will not go wrong and remain unchanged, and develop healthily and sustainably according to the original design intention, we must adhere to five basic principles:
People-oriented, focusing on construction. The fundamental purpose of building characteristic towns is to meet people’s employment, housing and life needs, which is also the most important factor for the attractiveness and popularity of characteristic towns. This requires the construction of comfortable and convenient public facilities and services, including adequate infrastructure, high-quality public services and social security, and a pleasant ecological environment.
One town, one industry, integration of production and town. The development of characteristic towns must have the industrial support of market competitiveness and sustainable viability. Efforts should be made to build basic conditions conducive to industrial development and an open and inclusive business environment, so as to facilitate investors to independently and efficiently combine various types of production and engage in industrial activities.
Highlight the characteristics to revitalize the town. Characteristic industry is the core of the development of characteristic towns and the most critical factor to maintain the vitality of characteristic towns. It is necessary to proceed from the reality of local economic and social development, develop characteristic industries, inherit traditional culture, pay attention to ecological environment protection, improve municipal infrastructure and public service facilities, and prevent a thousand towns from being one side. The industries of characteristic towns must be based on local special natural endowments and resource and environmental advantages, such as leisure tourism industry based on the advantages of agriculture and natural landscape, resource development and processing and manufacturing industry based on industrial resources, and supporting industries based on leading industries or industrial clusters in cities or regions.
Government-enterprise cooperation, market-oriented. The construction of characteristic towns is a long-term and systematic project. The government and enterprises should strengthen in-depth cooperation, strive for mutual benefit and win-win, and establish a benign interaction and market-oriented mechanism between the government and enterprises. It is necessary to promote the improvement of the construction and operation mode of characteristic towns by means of government guidance, enterprise main body and market-oriented operation, and invest, construct, operate and manage the development of characteristic towns with more market-oriented investment mechanism and operation mode. The government should avoid doing everything, and focus on creating a good development environment for characteristic towns and providing various services for investment and operation enterprises.
According to local conditions, do what you can. Proceed from the reality of each region, follow objective laws, seek truth from facts, do what you can, control quantity, improve quality, reflect regional differences, advocate morphological diversity, do not engage in regional balance, industrial balance, quantity requirements and performance evaluation, and prevent blind development and rushing headlong into it.
Reporter: How to promote the development of characteristic towns in the right direction by improving relevant systems?
Huang Kun: It is inseparable from the reform and innovation of relevant systems to ensure the standardized development and stability of characteristic towns.
Establish an institutional mechanism for long-term benign interaction between the government and enterprises. Generally speaking, the government should control the overall situation and enterprises should pay more attention to operation and maintenance. However, in different construction stages, the relationship between the government and enterprises should be dynamically adjusted. In the early stage of town construction, the government should take the lead in making plans and providing basic public facilities services, and give full play to the guiding role of financial funds. In the middle and late stage of town construction, we should actively introduce professional operators and industrial operating institutions to supplement and enhance the town’s production function and life service function in time.
Establish an effective incentive and restraint mechanism. It is necessary to appropriately expand the management authority of characteristic towns, and gradually realize the orderly decentralization of financial rights, land rights and affairs rights for the established towns that are included in the construction scope of characteristic towns, and their management functions and authority can be treated according to county towns or mega-towns; Non-organic towns can be allowed to set up characteristic town management committees with certain authority. It is necessary to innovate the policy incentive mechanism, change the distribution sequence of policy support funds, and give timely rewards such as funds to create qualified characteristic towns, instead of blindly giving financial support to characteristic towns that are only in the conceptual stage. It is necessary to determine the long-term investment mechanism in social undertakings, earnestly implement the concept of shared development, and constantly improve the sense of gain of the town and its surrounding residents.
Improve the investment and financing mechanism. Innovate the investment and financing mechanism for the construction of characteristic towns, vigorously promote the cooperation between the government and social capital, encourage the use of financial funds to incite social funds, and jointly initiate the establishment of characteristic town construction funds; Study and set up a national new urbanization construction fund to support the development and construction of characteristic towns; Encourage development banks, agricultural development banks, agricultural banks and other financial institutions to increase financial support; Encourage qualified small towns to broaden financing channels by issuing bonds and other means; Classify the construction contents of characteristic towns and actively encourage the overall entry of enterprise funds.
Improve the supporting guarantee mechanism. It is necessary to fully liberalize the restrictions on the settlement of small towns, fully implement the residence permit system, and continuously expand the scope of public services; Establish and improve the voluntary paid circulation and withdrawal mechanism of rural land contracting rights, homestead use rights and collective income distribution rights of farmers who have settled in cities; According to the model of "small government, big service", the large-scale department system is implemented to reduce administrative costs and improve administrative efficiency.