Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Tzuhsun Hsu/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 2.0
CIVIL SOCIETY groups demonstrated outside of DPP headquarters late last month, in protest against the Lai administration’s failure to live up to campaign promises to build social housing. In particular, civil society groups criticized the Lai administration for promising to build 130,000 units of social housing during elections, then quietly revising this down to 40,000 units.
Indeed, Lai did not mention social housing during the speech that he gave two mark the two-year anniversary of his taking office. Likewise, the amendment of social housing goals down to 40,000 units may be because as of February, 43,666 units of social housing were built. In this way, the Lai administration could perhaps claim to have reached its goal.
At the demonstration, civil society groups called on the DPP to provide for affordable housing, rather than only rental subsidies. Currently, at least 750,000 households participate in rental subsidy programs rolled out by the government.
Nevertheless, it currently requires 9.58 years of annual income to afford a home, a statistic criticized by civil society groups as beyond the three to five years of annual income to afford a home in other countries. This has often led to the quip–backed up by statistics–that one would have to not eat or drink for fifteen years to be able to afford a home in Taipei. Consequently, it is 35to 45-year-olds who are first-time homebuyers in Taiwan, compared to 30 to 35-year-olds in other contexts.
To this extent, it was pointed out that renters may spend more than 30% of their income on rent while the annual mortgage rate has reached 42.42%–meaning that workers are spending half of their salaries on mortgages.
Photo credit: OURs/Facebook
Taiwan’s housing issues have long been intractable as a result of an overheated housing market. Combined with low salaries, real estate speculation has resulted in frequent construction of units that remain empty, or the hoarding of units as a form of investment. Efforts by the government to regulate the housing market have included a database to show real estate transactions, as well as taxes on owning more than one property.
Likewise, the issue of social housing has also been a recurrent stumbling block for both local and central governments–oftentimes running into issues where the central government is currently DPP-controlled, but many local governments are KMT-controlled. Past proposals to divide up the labor of constructing social housing units between the local and central government have not been successful.
When it comes to social housing, as well as Taiwan’s recurrent issues with unaffordable housing, both major political parties are largely in agreement. Though the specifics of solutions offered vary, both parties agree that this is an issue–and yet, a rare example of bipartisan consensus between the DPP and KMT has not been sufficient to address the issue. And if the Lai administration intends to quietly shelve efforts to tackle one of contemporary Taiwan’s most intractable social issues, it may be no surprise that Lai has not been able to win widespread support at a time of rising socioeconomic inequality in not only in Taiwan but also in the world.