Ho Chi Minh City, illustration photo In 2015, Emaar Properties from Dubai decided to co-develop a mammoth $1.42 billion urban area in Binh Quoi-Thanh Da of Ho Chi Minh City with domestic Bitexco Group. Despite having the requisite financial and technical capacity, Emaar Properties, however, had to withdraw from the project in 2017, after the compensation and land clearance was not completed in two years. Also impacted by the sluggish compensation and land clearance, Hongkong Land, a company under Jardine Matheson Vietnam, in 2016 had to quit from a project on a golden land plot in the city centre. Alain Cany, country chairman of Jardine Matheson Group, previously told VIR that despite the company’s tight co-operation with the city authorities, it was difficult to manage the delays caused by land clearance and compensation which also increased costs. According to Nguyen Thanh Phong, Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee, improving the … [Read more...] about Ho Chi Minh City calls for investors in 210 projects
Is saigon now called ho chi minh city
Milk flower tree in centre of Ho Chi Minh City
For years now, a woman whose hair is now white has been seen around there since she was still young. When the tree was small, she watered it and cared for it. When the tree was in full bloom, she came to look at it and often brought some branches home. She calls it the milk flower tree. In the mid-Autumn Festival this year, she was seen going together with a young girl to see the milk flower tree. The girl bore some features of a Western girl, with a high nose and white skin, but her eyes and hair were as black as those of the Vietnamese. She spoke fluent Vietnamese. Different from the other years when she came and watched in silence the flowers on the tree, she was smiling and looking at the girl with love in her eye. She slowly answered the girl’s repeated questions. “Grandma, why is it called the milk flower? And why is there only this one in the middle of all these ancient khaya and tamarind trees?” She was astounded at the question; her eyes welled up in tears, … [Read more...] about Milk flower tree in centre of Ho Chi Minh City
Ho Chi Minh City could be a swamp 50 years from now
It is not a mere problem anymore, but an existential threat that is facing the nation’s biggest city, according to the Netherlands Embassy in Hanoi. It is possible that a major part of the city can lie below sea level in 50 years, turning into a swamp, said Laurent Umans, the embassy's First Secretary, Water and Climate Change. The dire warning came at a meeting held on Thursday to call for investment for ongoing anti-floding projects in the city. Ho Chi Minh City now needs VND73.5 trillion ($3.16 billion) to implement the rest of its 2016-2020 drainage system master plan, Nguyen Hoang Anh Dung, deputy director of the city’s Steering Center for the Urban Flood Control Program, said at the meeting. Under this plan, the inner-city area needs 6,000 km (over 3,700 miles) of sewers of different types by 2020. So far, around 4,176 km of these sewers have been built. The city has only finished two of 12 planned wastewater treatment plants, 64 km out of 149 km of dykes along … [Read more...] about Ho Chi Minh City could be a swamp 50 years from now
Ho Chi Minh City calls for investment to 14 PPP medical projects
Besides calling for capital in the form of public-private partnership (PPP), Ho Chi Minh City is deploying multiple experimental investment models to mobilise private capital to invest in medical projects. Medical tourism has been gaining traction in Ho Chi Minh City According to Tran Vinh Tuyen, Deputy Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee, at a meeting with the representatives of 15 American medical companies seeking cooperation and investment opportunities, there are still many medical projects that need investment into material facilities and equipment among others to improve the quality of healthcare, which the city budget cannot cover. Thus, Ho Chi Minh City lists 14 projects that need about VND15 trillion ($654.04 million) of PPP investment. The city’s budget for medical projects currently makes up 12 per cent of the total new investment costs and still cannot meet half of what the field demands. Meanwhile, according to plan, from 2016 … [Read more...] about Ho Chi Minh City calls for investment to 14 PPP medical projects
To street vendors in Vietnam’s biggest cities, sidewalk is a lifeline
A new day starts at 2:30 a.m. for Hiep and her four housemates who rent a small apartment tucked away down a Saigon alley. They need to make tofu pudding in time for 6 a.m., when they loads pots full of the hot dessert onto their bicycles and off they go to the inner city to find customers. At the same time, around 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) north, Quyen loads duck embryos and chicken eggs onto the back of a motorbike and travels from the outskirts of Hanoi to the Old Quarter in the downtown district of Hoan Kiem. Everyday, tens of thousands of vendors leave their rented apartments in big cities for busy streets to pay off debts and keep their families in the countryside afloat. They are the faces behind telling statistics that have been troubling policymakers for years: migrants and unofficial workers. Official government data from 2015 showed that migrants aged between 15 and 59 made up 17.3 percent of the country’s population of 90 million. The majority of them work in the … [Read more...] about To street vendors in Vietnam’s biggest cities, sidewalk is a lifeline