Housing Movement activists and opposition lawmakers yesterday lambasted the Ministry of the Interior’s budget proposal on housing policy for next year.
The groups said the budget is a serious misallocation of funding, with the majority of housing subsidies going toward home loan subsidies and a transfer of NT$10 billion (US$329 million) from the Housing Foundation to the national treasury.
The debate on housing policy comes on the heels of a massive “sleepout” initiated by the Housing Movement last weekend, in which a reported 15,000 people camped out overnight on Taipei’s Renai Road to protest against unaffordable housing.
According to the ministry’s proposal, out of a total of NT$5.3 billion proposed for housing-related subsidies, NT$1.3 billion would be reserved for rental subsidies, while the remaining three-quarters would be for financial assistance for home loans.
However, critics have decried the plan as more beneficial to real-estate developers than to the general public.
“Rental subsidies can help underprivileged people,” Taiwan Labor Front member Hung Ching-shu (洪敬舒) said.
“With soaring house prices, when the government encourages people to purchase real estate with home-loan subsidies, they are actually bailing out developers, while trapping an entire younger generation in a vortex of sky-high prices,” Hung said.
Opposition legislators Chen Chieh-ju (陳潔如) and Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) slammed the ministry over its proposed allocation of funding for the Housing Foundation.
The lawmakers said funding for the foundation, which is charged with the construction of public housing, has shrunk by NT$21.1 billion because of cash transfers to the national treasury over the past five years.
“We must question the government’s resolve to build public housing,” Chen Chieh-ju said.
During a question-and-answer session with Minister of the Interior Chen Wei-zen (陳威仁) later yesterday, Chen Chi-mai demanded that the transfer be canceled, adding that a minimum of 20 percent of subsidies should be reserved for rental transactions.
The minister described the transfer as a “normal dispatching of funds,” adding that the Housing Foundation had enough funding to run smoothly for another year or two.
“Our national treasury is stretched at the moment, so the transfer would simply reduce the need to get bank loans or issue public debt,” Chen Wei-zen said, adding that the transfer is to be a temporary one.
Chen Wei-zen said that local governments would share responsibility on rental subsidies, adding that 10,000 more families would become recipients next year.
Despite several government announcements over the past week promising swift reform, leaders of the Housing Movement remain unconvinced.
“What we see is only a shanzhai [fake] version of the demands we made,” activist Peng Yang-kai (彭揚凱) said, adding that the government’s plans for reform were seriously lacking in sincerity.
The Housing Movement made five demands: increased protection against forced evacuation; reform of property taxation to prevent speculative investment; a halt to for-sale public housing projects; the construction of for-rent public housing; and the development of a mature rental market.
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