A furious Yang Wenzhen rejected a compensation offer from the local government for the 12-sq-m apartment she shares with three family members in Beijing's Tongzhou district.

"It all comes down to this: I am ready to be a nail house owner," said the 61-year-old retired employee of a State-owned engineering company as she visited the headquarters for the relocation project.

Demolition of some government-owned buildings has already begun to make way for a complete revamping of the area.

Waving a copy of the evaluation report for her apartment, Yang said she only read in Thursday's newspaper that residents had to queue to book a favorable home location when their current apartments are leveled this year.

"I thought the authorities would come to us because we were elderly," Yang said. "But they did not seem to bother."

Yang decided her family will wait until relocation officials visit "more earnestly" and with better terms to consider a relocation offer.

Cheng Zhizheng, 59, another resident who has lived in the area for six decades, looked stressed as he walked away from a crowd gathered outside the relocation office.

Cheng said he queued for five days and nights to become the 19th person in his neighborhood to sign relocation agreements with the authorities.

"I have slept no more than three hours each day since last week. I was so worried and so were my wife and my two daughters," he told METRO, after selling his 12-sq-m house for 15,000 yuan per sq m to the government-funded developers, the Beijing New City Investment and Development Co.

Some of the thousands of residents who flocked to the demolition zone in central Tongzhou on Thursday morning said they felt they "were urged to sell" to authorities hungry for land exploitation and financial gain.

Yang and her family studied the 425,000-yuan compensation package and determined they were still 320,000 yuan short of what they need to buy a new apartment, which has yet to be built.

"We visited the site of the new apartment and we don't like it," she said. "I don't understand why the authorities gave us so little time to consider our options," she said.

The Tongzhou district government, eager to launch a multibillion-yuan redevelopment project in its central area, has slated plans to build 8,500 apartments for the relocated families by 2012.

Relocated families can choose to collect compensation in cash or receive a new apartment, the authorities said.

But for many of the 15,000 households that will be moved in the next few months the future remains unclear.

"The first phase of the relocation is for the good guys who are willing to obey the government," said a local official, who did not want to named.