Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) recently announced his public housing policy aimed at trying to lower real-estate prices in Taipei and New Taipei City, causing protests and panic among owners of luxury apartments, showing that Ko’s policy might just be on the right tracks.
The protesters are not victims of urban renewal or development projects. Far from it, they are the owners of luxury housing units, which are rented out or sold when the price is right.
Owners of luxury housing units in MeHAS City (美河市), in New Taipei City’s Xindian District (新店) — but administered by the Taipei City Government since it is attached to an MRT station — are especially enraged because Ko has proposed renting out vacant apartments in the complex as public housing units. This suggestion has caused private home owners to worry that both rent and property prices might collapse, saying that their “life savings,” which have been invested in such property, might evaporate.
This is rather ironic, since the protesters are mostly wealthy real-estate owners, many of whom own more than one property, and make capital gains from renting out or selling the properties.
Across the Xindian River (新店溪), merely a couple of hundred meters from MeHAS City, is a village called Sijhou Township (溪洲部落), where most of the residents are Amis Aborigines from Hualien and Taitung.
Although the existence of the village is illegal, it has been home to the scores of people who came to Taipei decades ago to work in the construction industry and other low-paying jobs.
As these people could not afford housing in the city, they built their own homes with whatever materials they could find on the plot of land beside the river, and despite often coming under threat of flooding and government demolition, the villagers have survived.
Most Sijhou residents — many of whom worked on the construction of MeHAS City and other luxury apartment complexes — would be unable to even afford a toilet in MeHAS City. If real-estate investors did not make investments that led to the inflation in property prices, perhaps Sijhou residents would be able to finance safer shelters from the fruits of their labor.
What happened to Sijhou is not an isolated case; similar circumstances can be seen across the whole nation, where hardworking people remain unable to afford to buy modest homes, while the wealthy own multiple properties and rent them out at high prices.
In addition, thousands of families and farmers are forced to leave their homes and farms as the government forcibly seizes their land for constructing industrial estates and luxury housing complexes.
What Ko has announced is only a small step toward improving social justice in housing and bringing down over-inflated property prices. What he has in mind might not be perfect, as the proposed rental prices for public housing units are still too high, and the effectiveness of the policies in the long run still remains questionable.
However, at least the first step has been taken and, judging from the reaction of luxury home owners, it might actually be the right move.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US