Taiwan's Housing Crisis - by Alethios - Public Service

The price of housing in Taipei has tripled in the last twenty years. Three-bedroom apartments out in New Taipei City routinely sell for 20x the median annual income, making housing significantly less affordable here than even San Francisco, Sydney, Vancouver, and London 1 . The result is a generation priced out of housing and a dramatic collapse in family creation.

Learning this was a great shock to me. Taipei seems to be covered in highrises, and with pragmatic and low-cost construction, I assumed houses would be small but reasonably affordable, as in Japan. Instead, dysfunctional urban planning has created one of the world's least affordable cities.

The crisis has deep roots in Taiwanese history and the transition to democracy. In 1945, the Japanese colony of Taiwan was ceded to the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomingtang, or KMT), who began a series of disastrous experiments in collectivization. All senior judiciary, managerial, and administrative postings were replaced by KMT loyalists. Businesses and property were seized and amalgamated into state-sanctioned monopolies who, it was believed, would be more efficient under the guidance of benevolent state than in the hands of private individuals.

As with every other occasion this has been attempted, the result was a collapse in the production of goods and agricultural products and a breakdown in public services and order. Inflation skyrocketed, shortages grew, and the price of rice rose over 100x. Protests broke out throughout the country. Martial law was declared, and the protests were violently put down, resulting in the deaths of some 20,000 Taiwanese.

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