The Taipei City Government yesterday signed an agreement with Fortune Construction Co to build the Dongming Public Housing buildings in the city’s Nangang District (南港).
The NT$2.66 billion (US$78.69 million) public housing project involves the construction of three 21-story buildings and one six-story building, which are to have 700 housing units in total, the Taipei City Government Department of Urban Planning said.
The apartments would constitute a portion of 6,000 “smart community” public housing units for lease to people studying or working in Taipei, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said.
The lower levels of the buildings are to be used by daycare centers, nursing facilities and convenience stores to respond to Taipei’s aging population, he said.
Ko expressed gratitude to the Construction and Planning Agency, which provided a subsidy of NT$760 million.
He said he is hopeful that the apartments would have the highest quality among public housing units in Asia once they are completed, which is slated for late 2018.
The basic equipment for the smart communities are the three “smart meters” — water, electricity and natural gas meters — that would be installed in every home, Taipei Deputy Mayor Charles Lin (林欽榮) said, adding that the first two meters would help tenants monitor their water and electricity consumption to cap carbon dioxide emissions, while the gas meter would protect them from accidents caused by gas leaks.
A building information model, which would upload data on the replacement of electrical appliances and other refurbishments to the cloud, would help the city government reduce the buildings’ management costs, Lin said.
Chunghwa Telecom would provide and maintain Internet-based correspondence systems, general manager Shih Mu-piao (石木標) said, while Acer would be in charge of visual correspondence services.
These features would allow tenants to directly contact the city government regarding any issues with the buildings, Shih said.
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