The Taipei City Government is mistreating tenants under the city’s social housing policy and behaving like a “bad landlord,” the New Power Party (NPP) said yesterday.
As a result of city oversight, tenants are needlessly mistreated and “pushed around” for political purposes, NPP Legislator Chiu Hsien-chih (邱顯智) told a news conference at the legislature.
NPP city councilor candidate Lin Po-hsun (林柏勛) said he received complaints from a Taipei resident in a social housing complex who was allotted a unit under the city’s Youth Innovation program.
Photo: CNA
Lin said the tenant was required to attend a certain number of events organized by the Taipei City Government to continue his lease.
“This person was approved for social housing due to his personal circumstances, but must face an ‘evil landlord’ that forced him to attend city-organized events during weekdays. It has severely affected his job and quality of life,” Lin said.
Joined by Chiu and NPP executive council member Lee Chao-li (李兆立), Lin said the Taipei government should stop using social housing residents to create an audience for policy presentations.
A Department of Urban Development official surnamed Lan (藍) allegedly told the resident to register at events to continue his lease, Lin said.
“This is a form of intimidation against residents of housing units under the Youth Innovation program,” Lin added.
“The resident was asked to participate in the recording of a television program, and when the segment was broadcast, he found it was an part of a government tourism advertisement campaign,” Lin said.
Qualification to reside in social housing should not be partisan, he added.
Chiu said he was angered to learn about the resident’s situation.
“The Taipei City Government is more malicious than some private landlords,” he said.
As social housing projects have received subsidies from the central government, officials at the Ministry of the Interior and the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Center should condemn this contravention of housing rights, Chiu said.
He also said that a proposal by former Taipei deputy mayor and independent mayoral candidate Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) to allow for social housing residents to purchase their units contravenes the Housing Act (住宅法).
“When government-built social housing is allowed to be sold, even when subsidized as affordable housing, property speculation is fueled and pushes up prices,” Chiu said, adding that this overall worsens affordability problems.
“Huang’s proposal is just creating a trap and shifting the problem to others. In Taipei, we need social housing only for lease, and to offer more living choices,” he added.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS