Politicians yesterday exchanged barbs over urban renewal and disaster prevention mechanisms following the collapse of a building complex in Tainan in an earthquake on Feb. 6, with former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) accusing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers of stalling urban renewal aimed at increasing the nation’s disaster prevention capacity.
Tsai yesterday said on Facebook that Taiwan, instead of establishing earthquake-resistant construction regulations and minimum legal resistance requirements, has imposed stricter control on urban renewal geared toward disaster prevention, which Tsai blamed on DPP legislators Pasuya Yao (姚文智) and Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) and former DPP legislator Tien Chiu-ching (田秋堇).
Japan introduced earthquake regulations in 1924 requiring buildings to withstand magnitude 5 earthquakes and later raised the requirement to magnitude 6 earthquakes in 1981, Tsai said.
The Japanese government in 1995 required buildings found to not meet basic earthquake resistance requirements to undergo improvements, which Tsai said was similar to Taiwan’s urban renewal projects geared toward disaster prevention, adding that the threshold for a construction firm to proceed with a renewal project was lowered from 75 percent of residents involved to 50 percent in Japan in 2014.
“Activists have vehemently opposed urban renewal projects since a controversial case involving a Wang (王) family in [Taipei’s] Shilin District (士林). DPP legislators joined the fuss and asked that urban renewal be regulated through stricter measures, to the extent that even renewal projects focused on disaster prevention are required to garner the consent of 90 percent of a building’s residents, which is the most ridiculous standard in the world,” Tsai said.
Yu said on Facebook that urban renewal is too often transformed into an investment tool instead of a means to ensure public safety.
“Tying urban renewal and disaster prevention together is a false starting point. The so-called ‘disaster prevention urban renewal’ is simply a deception. Areas scheduled to undergo renewal are usually not in urgent need of disaster prevention improvements, but are instead profitable properties, while renewal cannot get underway in disaster-prone areas where there is no profit,” Yu said.
Protecting people’s property rights is the only reason DPP legislators asked for stricter controls on urban renewal projects, in an effort to prevent urban renewal from becoming a tool for property speculation, she said.
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