The Taipei City Government signed a memorandum of understanding with National Taiwan University (NTU) yesterday to develop an area in the city’s center in the opening round of sweeping plans for urban renewal.
“As buildings older than 30 years were not constructed to be earthquake-resistant, it is important that we speed up the process of urban renewal,” said Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who has made urban renewal plans central to his administration’s agenda.
He also cited the need to beautify the city and improve residents’ living standards.
Ko said that the city government’s resources and public domain power would restart the stalled development of a university property on Shaoxing S Street (紹興南街) near NTU Hospital, adding that his personal ties to the university would aid cooperation. Ko formerly served as chairman of the hospital’s Department of Traumatology.
NTU owns more than 88 percent of the site, which lies on prime real estate near the Taipei Railway Station and the Presidential Office Building, but has been occupied by low-income squatters for decades. University efforts to evict the squatters in 2011 provoked a backlash of student protests, which forced the university to put site development on hold.
Plans announced yesterday call for the site’s low-lying houses to be demolished to make way for a medical complex and public housing, with funding to be provided by leasing out part of the site for the construction of a five-star hotel.
The former residence of Lee Chen-yuan (李鎮源) — democracy activist and former dean of NTU’s College of Medicine — is to be preserved.
In exchange for a rent-free lease on the site’s planned public housing complexes, the city would be responsible for designing and implementing construction plans, including conducting negotiations to gain the consent of site residents and landowners.
NTU General Affairs vice president Wang Gen-shuh (王根樹) said that while registered “low-income households” (低收入戶) would be allowed to continue living on the site, all other residents would be required to meet criteria determined by the school to be classified as members of a “disadvantaged group.”
While 80 percent of site residents fall in the lowest income bracket, only 10 percent are members of registered “low-income households,” a school survey showed.
The Shaoxing Community Rights Advocacy Association (紹興社區權益促進會) and NTU student activist group Shaoxing Program (紹興學程) issued a statement welcoming the plan in principle, while calling on NTU to ensure that affordable rental terms in the new development are given to the site’s residents.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater