After meeting with the Alliance for Social Housing on Oct. 13, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) gave the Ministry of the Interior one month to come up with a social housing plan. This might sound like an active response to public opinion, but when looked at closely, Ma’s hasty policy proposal was clearly made with a view to the upcoming special municipality elections. This is rather worrying and prompts a number of questions.
Taipei City started promoting state-owned rental housing in 1994, when former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was mayor. Following Chen’s term as mayor, Ma also served as Taipei mayor for eight years. If Ma is sincere in his support for social housing, then why after 16 years, up to and including the term of his successor as Taipei mayor, Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), does the city only have 3,884 units of government-owned rental housing?
The Cabinet ratified an overall housing policy on May 24, 2005. This policy clearly called for the provision of social housing so that citizens with varying incomes, mental and physical abilities, genders, ages, household makeups and cultural backgrounds could all have access to a comfortable and dignified living environment. Why, in two-and-a-half years of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule, has this policy not been followed up with a clear plan, and why has the matter only come to the government’s attention now?
After the Cabinet ratified its overall housing policy, the Ministry of the Interior should have got down to work on implementing it, so why has the ministry never formulated a plan for implementing social housing policy? Why is it only recently that five tracts of land have suddenly been found for building social housing?
When a policy has been ratified, it should be put forward for legislation. When the Democratic Progressive Party was in government, it prepared a draft housing law. Why has the KMT administration, in its two-and-a-half years in office, not actively promoted legislation of the housing law, but instead left the draft law lying in the offices of the Cabinet?
The overall housing policy set forth in 2005 already includes the concept of social housing. So why, earlier this year, did Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) keep promising that “low-cost housing” would be built around the planned A7 Taoyuan Airport line MRT station in Linkou (林口), later rephrasing this as “suitable housing” and just recently saying that 5 percent of this development would be reserved for social housing? This shows that Ma’s government has no real intention of providing social housing at all.
In its budget for next year, the Construction and Planning Agency has got no further than the outdated idea of formulating and promoting a social housing plan. There is no sign of any social housing actually appearing, or of any budget allocation for building social housing. How can social housing be built if there isn’t any money for it?
Fifty years ago, the national government started to build state-owned housing, but in the end this plan went nowhere because state-owned land was sold off on the cheap. Those houses that were built for poor people to live in 40 years ago are now little more than slums. Given its past record, who really thinks that the central government is going to make good on its election promises?
It has been announced that late this year, five pieces of land will be used to build 1,661 units of social housing, but what about next year and the year after? What country other than Taiwan would make its policies in such a short-term fashion? Social housing requires long-term planning, like Sweden’s construction of a million affordable dwellings in 10 years. So far Taiwan’s government is only promising a paltry 1,661 units. When the supply is so tiny, these homes are bound to end up as collection points for the disadvantaged. Throwing social housing out like scraps for disadvantaged groups to fight over only serves to stigmatize it. Is this how Ma’s government intends to treat disadvantaged citizens? Is this what we expect of a government?
The kind of social housing we want must be integrated into the community, not separate and stigmatized. A full range of social services and adequate facilities for daily life must be built in, and they should be of a quality acceptable to the whole community. That requires comprehensive planning and consensus building, not off-the-cuff ideas and empty promises made solely to win votes. If these conditions are not met, today’s talk of social housing will surely end in failure, just like the low-priced housing of yesteryear.
Lin Wan-i is a professor of social work at National Taiwan University.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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