Councilors want evicted tenants allowed back in

JAKARTA (JP): City councilors are pressuring the city-owned property developer, PD Sarana Jaya, to allow evicted residents of a low-cost apartment building in Penjaringan, West Jakarta, to resettle there while they process the necessary Jakarta identity cards.

Twenty-five residents of the apartment complex in Penjaringan, North Jakarta, were evicted from one of the buildings by the manager last week on the grounds that they did not have Jakarta citizenship cards.

"We strongly urge the company to give them a chance to return to the building and to let them process their identity cards because they had been living there for three years," Abdoelhamid Notowidagdo, a member of the City Council's Commission A, which is in charge of government, security and public order, told reporters yesterday.

Notowidagdo explained that based on a gubernatorial decree, the building manager does not have the authority to evict.

"The authority to evict is given only to the city housing office, not to the manager," he said, adding that this decision was intended to prevent manager's from evicting people in order to be able to offer the apartments to new tenants.

Last week, the apartment house management sealed the doors of three apartments while their occupants were out working. This has forced the evicted people to camp out in the courtyard outside the apartment building.

"Our clothes and stuff are still in the rooms, we cannot take them out," Supardi, one of the evicted occupants, told the councilors who visited the apartment complex yesterday.

They complained to the councilors that they had always paid the rent on time and had a right to the apartments.

A daily rental system is used at the low cost apartment complex in Penjaringan, through which the occupants can make monthly payments toward the purchase of the units. The apartments were initially occupied in 1986 by fire victims and area residents whose land had been appropriated.

The apartments come in three sizes: 18, 36 and 54 square meters. There are a total of 1,300 apartments in the complex. The cost varies according to floor the apartments are located on.

Occupants of an 18 square-meter unit on the first floor pay Rp 51,000 per month, while those living in a 36 square-meter apartment on the second floor pay Rp 140,000.

Recently occupants of the complex went to the City Council to complain about evictions and unwritten rules used to pressure them to pay bribes in order to keep their apartments.

Inconsistency

After visiting the apartment complex, councilor Djeny Suharso said that the problem had arisen because of inconsistency on the part of the management in renting and selling the apartments.

He explained that according to the gubernatorial decree, only people holding Jakarta identity cards have the right to rent or own the apartments. In reality, many occupants who have only seasonal, or temporary, identity cards are allowed to rent the facilities as long as they can afford it.

"This situation is creating another social problem which is feared to have the possibility of undermining the nation's unity," Suharso said.

Suharso pointed out an old man, who said that his neighbor was evicted because he does not have Jakarta identity card. The man had explained that the unit was later occupied by new occupants of Chinese descent, who do not have the necessary Jakarta citizenship cards either.

He said that such inconsistency could discourage Jakartans from wanting to live in apartments in the midst of a citywide drive to familiarize residents with apartment living.

He said that available data show that 29 percent of the occupants in Penjaringan apartments have only seasonal identity cards. (yns)