The Taipei City Government should give priority to disabled people in renting out joint development housing projects, members of the People’s Democratic Front (PDF) yesterday said, as they also called for rent to be based on the tenants’ income rather than market prices.
They protested outside a city government-sponsored forum on “social housing.”
“The severely disabled have relatively rigid transportation needs — so of course you need to live somewhere convenient,” said Chou Chih-wen (周志文), a research specialist with the PDF’s disability rights group.
He said that people with disabilities should be given priority because “the best places should be given to those with the greatest needs.”
“We feel that joint development housing would be the most convenient place for us to live, as well the most convenient place from which to commute to school or hospitals,” he said.
Under joint development agreements, the city receives a certain portion of luxury apartments built by private contractors on prime land appropriated by the city as part of the MRT construction process.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) administration has chosen to rent out the newly completed luxury apartments at a discount as “social housing,” instead of selling them like previous administrations.
However, Chou said the discounted rate is still too expensive for renters from disadvantaged groups, adding that the government should not tie rental fees to market rates.
“A discount of only 15 percent is totally out of touch with reality because there is absolutely no way we can afford those rates,” he said.
The policy also violates the spirit of the Housing Act (住宅法), which serves as the legal foundation for publicly owned social housing, he said.
The law stipulates that the purpose of social housing is to provide residences for people from disadvantaged groups, he said, calling for rents to be based on a fixed percentage of renter’s income rather than market rates.
City plans to rent out the apartments it owns within joint developments as social housing have led to protests from neighbors, who are concerned that renting to people from disadvantaged groups would drive down their property values.
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
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
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