Renumbering project stymied by unnamed streets

The city’s Department of Construction says these streets pose major hurdles to the renumbering project.

The project could be renewed later because relevant agencies would not be able to renumber all the houses that carry non-sequential door numbers, the department said on Wednesday.

The pilot project, launched late last year, aims to end the confusion that the door numbers of nearly 149,000 houses in Go Vap, Binh Chanh, Binh Tan and District 12 are embroiled in.

Lessons learnt from the project are set to be applied when it is extended to the remaining 20 districts of the city at a later date.

The department said there were many streets without names in outlying districts that have experienced fast urbanization in recent years.

Around 160 streets in Binh Chanh and 106 others in Binh Tan have no name because they have either been constructed newly or widened from alleys.

Many infrastructure projects will construct new streets in the current residential areas and the houses cannot be renumbered at once.

District authorities have begun collecting registrations from houses in the four districts that would be renumbered by the project, including 100,000 in Go Vap, 20,955 houses in Binh Tan, 2,706 in District 12 and 25,000 in Binh Chanh.

The pilot project is expected to cost more than VND3.2 billion (US$180,400).

The city People’s Committee planned to issue a regulation about numbering houses after the project that would apply to the remaining districts.

The committee has clarified that numbering a house does not mean recognition of the legality.

The pilot project will number or renumber many houses that have been built without construction permits, but not those built after the Construction Law took effect on July 1, 2004. There are about 11,000 such houses in the city.

In 1988, city authorities changed all door numbers in the 12 inner-city districts and half those in five outlying districts. However, fewer than 80 percent of the planned 859,568 numbers were changed, affecting continuity on streets that displayed both old and new numbers.