Shanghai's Huangpu District has opened a new apartment building in downtown to accommodate professionals working for local financial companies.
The Bund Financial Talents Apartment on Zhonghua Road in the Dongjiadu area has 276 apartments with sizes ranging from 40 to 80 square meters. It has become the largest "talent apartment project" in downtown, a senior official with the project said.
The first batch of residents will move into their apartments soon.
The coffee-colored high-rise building has a gym. Each apartment has a kitchen, bathroom and balcony, along with Internet access. Security guards and cleaners have begun working in the building.
Local financial companies or professionals can apply to the district government to rent the apartments at a lower rental. The government will also offer subsidies to professionals, the government said.
The district has built a total of 15 such apartment buildings for "talents" or highly skilled employees, with more than 1,000 apartments in total. Some 70 percent of them have been rented, the district government said.
Huangpu is also developing another apartment building project, named Dongyuanfang, nearby. This will have more than 120 apartments and will open early next year.
The government is also converting abandoned factory plants, warehouses and office buildings into apartments for highly skilled employees.
The district aims to convert Dongjiadu area, where the city's earliest shikumen, or stone-gate neighborhoods, were built, into Dongjiadu Financial City, on a par with Pudong's Lujiazui.
The 700,000-square-meter core area of Dongjiadu — equivalent to about 100 football pitches — is to be set aside for residential communities, with commercial, cultural and entertainment facilities taking up a fifth of the land area.
