Tue, Aug 23, 2016 page4

• Skepticism about NPA policy review

  ‘ACTIVATION’ ISSUE: The agency’s head said that it hopes to be able to allow long-term ‘illegal’ residents to rent the government-owned land they live on

  • By Abraham Gerber / Staff reporter
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  The National Property Administration’s (NPA) plans to revise its “activation” procedures for government-owned land to protect the rights of long-term residents yesterday drew skepticism from civil campaigners.

  “While the government has said it will move in the direction of allowing residents to rent land instead of suing them, legally, this can only be applied to land which is not already allocated for specific government uses, which unfortunately is not the situation in some of the controversial cases,” said Lin Yen-tung (林彥彤), a housing specialist for the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.

  National Property Administration Director-General Tseng Kuo-chi (曾國基) told a public hearing on Friday that the current “activation” procedure — which seeks to turn government land into a revenue source — would be reviewed.

  The agency hoped to move toward allowing long-term “illegal” residents to rent rather than being evicted, he said, citing the need to implement the residency rights contained within the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

  Lin said that his group is still waiting to see if the agency would adopt specific revisions to its operating rules to reduce the frequency of eviction suits, although he praised Tseng for referring to the covenant.

  Revisions to current “activation” procedures were necessary to allow fairer implementation given years of government neglect, he said.

  “In the early period after it relocated to Taiwan, the government did not have any housing policy, so they ignored — and even relied on — unregistered construction on government land,” he said. “This led residents to trust that they could live and work in peace, and they put down roots, but now the government has begun to take back land without any communication or resettlement plans, knocking the pillars of trust underlying the lives that residents have developed.”

  Because the central government expropriated all Japanese-owned land when it took control of Taiwan following World War II, close to 70 percent of the nation’s land is government-owned, he said.

  A substantial amount of housing was constructed without permit on empty government-owned plots by Mainlanders fleeing the Chinese Civil War, as well as people migrating from the countryside to cities.

  “Early on, many people probably did not know that they had to register for their properties to receive any legal guarantee of ownership,” he said.

  While such registration would have been denied, the government set a precedent by allowing the sale of such structures, taxed them and provided utilities to them, which often led residents to believe they legally owned the property.

  Because of the large numbers of such houses, in the early decades of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration the government had even provided compensation and resettlement when demolishing homes to make way for public construction, he said.

  The change in policy over the past decade was driven by the Control Yuan’s orders to “activate” government land so it could be turned into a source of revenue.

  The NPA has an annual quota to meet, he said.

  It must “activate” 10 percent of government land per year, which creates pressure to directly sue residents of unregistered structures to force their eviction, rather than negotiating with them and providing resettlement plans, he said.
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