The Cabinet on Thursday approved a plan to build an affordable housing project, aiming to offer 4,000 residential units near the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT system’s Linkou station in Taipei County. The government said it hoped to complete the project by 2013 and to sell the houses for as low as NT$150,000 per ping (3.3m²).
This affordable housing project is reminiscent of an earlier government proposal to develop 13 commuter routes nationwide in an attempt to cut suburban commute times to under an hour.
On Friday, several local land developers and construction companies held a gathering and said the government should not over-react to public concerns about an overheating market because soaring property prices were confined to certain areas in Taiwan.
Instead, they said the government should continue urban renewal projects to increase housing. They also suggested the government accelerate construction of public transportation to help low-income families and young workers find houses in suburban areas while keeping their jobs in urban areas.
Apart from its recent efforts to ward off speculative investment in the property market by tightening mortgage lending and suspending public land sales, the government’s affordable housing project would offer budget home-buyers an option to seek residences in the suburbs at a time when an increasing number of Taipei residents are being forced to leave the city because of rising housing prices.
However, this Linkou project, along with property developers’ calls for further improvement in public transportation in suburban areas, has a catch. While encouraging people to live in suburban areas will help decrease their financial burden, the suburban properties are likely not as good an investment as urban properties.
Both the government and property developers are leaving home-buyers in the dark about how quickly their suburban homes would depreciate when faced with a slump in the market, compared with luxury residences. Worse, suburban houses would also see their value appreciate much less than that of their urban counterparts in a booming market.
Moreover, as the government said it might build more affordable houses on the outskirts of Taipei if the Linkou project proves a success, people should know — and both the property developers and the government should remind them — that their homes are unlikely to appreciate if faced with a massive oversupply of such housing units.
The bottom line is, the success of the Linkou project hinges on how the government executes it. The long-delayed Tamhai New Township project, located approximately 1km northeast of Tamsui in Taipei County, is a case in point. The government has performed very poorly in its attempt to turn the 1,756-hectare plot of land into an ideal residential space over the past two decades.
The government’s recent moves to curb soaring property prices are welcome signs that it is paying attention to the matter, but those actions won’t last long and market forces will win out, eventually.
The government should know that while achieving housing affordability is a laudable goal, it will come only when we see employment grow, wages increase and threats of growing income inequality subside.
If the wealth gap continues to widen, encouraging low-income families and young people to move to suburban areas, leaving urban spaces to rich investors and wealthy families only, it would just escalate the tension between the haves and have-nots.
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