Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday said that 3,453 public housing units are expected to be completed in the city during his term in office, and that 8,794 more units would be under construction by the time his term ends.
Ko gave a presentation at the Taipei City Council, where he talked about issues such as city promotion, attracting investment, land property rights, urban renewal and public housing projects.
“It goes without saying that urban renewal is absolutely necessary,” Ko said.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
While the city’s elderly population is expected to surpass 20 percent of its total residents in five years, his visits to communities made him realize that many elderly residents “are like prisoners in their own homes” due to limited mobility and lack of elevators in old buildings, Ko said.
Buildings constructed before the Sept. 21, 1999, earthquake were not built to withstand strong earthquakes, so despite difficulties in accomplishing urban renewal projects, they must be done, Ko said.
Ko said the city is helping negotiate the Siwen Borough (斯文) urban renewal project in Taipei’s Datung District (大同), as 96 percent of the residents have completed rights transfers, adding that the city considers it a key demonstrative project and hopes to start reconstruction by March next year.
He said one of the more important programs is the so-called “168 mechanism” — projects that gain the approval of 100 percent of residents, with constructors obtaining a construction permit within six months, or eight if rights transfers are needed.
About 40 projects have been registered under the 168 mechanism, and the average time for the city government to approve a project is 136 days, Ko said, adding that the projects are handled separately to ensure efficiency.
Ko said that there are 29 public housing sites under construction and 3,453 units are expected to be completed during his first term in office, and 8,794 would be under construction by the time his term ends, for a total of 12,247 units, while the long-term goal was to reach 20,783 units.
Ko had pledged during his mayoral election campaign to build more than 20,000 public housing units within four years, but he yesterday said that he has recently discovered that there are about 36,000 housing units in Taipei that have been vacant for more than a year, so the city is modifying its rent subsidy policy and planning to implement a new renting mechanism to encourage homeowners to rent out their apartments.
The new policies would come into effect on Jan. 1, Ko 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:
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