Asprumnas Ready to Support Public Housing Programme, Proposes Special Financing Scheme for Low-Income Earners

Minister of Housing and Settlement Areas (PKP), Maruarar Sirait, has welcomed the commitment of the National Association of Simple/Healthy Housing Developers (Asprumnas) to support the acceleration of housing provision for the public. He expressed appreciation for the association’s ongoing synergy with the government and opened the door to expanding the scope of future cooperation. “I am pleased that Asprumnas is supporting government programmes, particularly in the field of public housing. Perhaps the size or scope of this cooperation can be expanded in the future,” said Minister Maruarar Sirait during Asprumnas’ 13th anniversary and National Working Meeting in Jakarta. Responding to this, Asprumnas Chairman M. Syawali Pratna emphasised that the main focus of the association’s National Working Meeting is to fully support government programmes to meet the need for decent housing for the wider community. He described this step as crucial, given the alarming national housing backlog. “The most important thing is the fulfilment of decent housing for the wider community. The association is focused on building a strong ecosystem to resolve the property backlog, which has now reached double digits. This is a major task for us in supporting the government’s programme,” Syawali stated. However, Syawali offered a critical note regarding the current subsidised housing financing schemes, including the option of a 40-year mortgage tenor, which he believes have not optimally absorbed the needs of Low-Income Communities (MBR). He noted that the majority of MBR individuals in the field still struggle to access banking services because they are categorised as not creditworthy. “We need to be more attractive in creating new schemes because the existing ones are not yet optimal. These low-income groups cannot access banking because they are considered unbankable. It is not just a matter of SLIK issues, but they genuinely have no credit history, so banks cannot accept them,” Syawali explained. Therefore, Asprumnas is pushing for the creation of new financing scheme variations that do not rely solely on formal financial institution mechanisms, so that the distribution of subsidised housing can be precisely targeted. “If the government can devise a new scheme that does not involve financial institutions, it would be better for us to resolve this property backlog more quickly,” he stressed.