The Taipei City Government is ignoring history by suing to force the evictions of residents of a neighborhood near Wolong Street (臥龍街) in Daan District (大安), advocates and residents said yesterday in a protest outside Taipei City Hall.
Pages from reams of documents swirled outside the building’s doors as 30 elderly protesters hurled what they said was evidence of their lawful residency into the air, shouting for city officials to pay attention to history and keep a past resettlement from becoming another eviction.
“These residents were resettled by the government, but now it is turning around and suing them after 60 years,” said Lin Yen-tung (林彥彤), a housing specialist for the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
Photo: Huang Chien-hao, Taipei Times
Contemporary newspaper reports and city government documents show that many of the residents’ households were among those designated to receive government help after being forced to relocate after a garbage incinerator was demolished to make way for the Xinyi Market, Lin said.
“There is no single government document stating that the 19 households [on Wolong Street] were allocated the land, but you can piece together that they basically all originated from the households which were to receive relief because of their displacement,” he said.
Huang-Hung Hsiu-ying (黃洪秀英), 80, said that most households had family members who were employed by the Taipei Department of Environment Protection, which is also responsible for garbage collection.
“After the city tore down our houses, it did not give us money directly — instead it used relief funds to purchase land for the city, which was then allocated to us,” she said, adding that the city was now seeking NT$800,000 from her household for what it said was unjust gains stemming from years of unpaid rent.
She said that the households on the street had paid to have the underlying land tamped down before building their homes.
Residents said that the orderly layouts and construction of their homes were evidence that they were not typical “illegal constructions.”
Rigid Taipei Department of Finance regulations were the primary cause of the residents’ legal troubles, Lin said.
“Current rules call for lawsuits across the board against structures and residents occupying city land,” he said. “The Department of Environmental Protection [which manages the land] is willing to allow them to continue residing there, but talks are stuck on Department of Finance regulations.”
Finance department public property management division head Shih Chun-hsia (石春霞) said that the environmental protection department could choose to allow residents to rent the land their homes were built on.
Whether or not to reduce the unjust gains claims could only be decided by a mayoral-level meeting of city officials, she said, while declining to comment on the residents’ claims that they had been resettled to the site.
“That is something only the managing agency would be familiar with,” she said.
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