Regions development would curb migration

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

This is the third in a series of articles on the city administration's treatment of unskilled migrants who migrate to Jakarta after the Idul Fitri holidays.

Diana, 30, works in Central Jakarta but lives in Bintaro, Tangerang. Hanny, 22, works in South Jakarta and lives in Bogor, and Suharyanto, 42, works in West Jakarta and lives in Bekasi.

More and more people are working in Jakarta and living on the outskirts of the city -- Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi -- because of the price of life in Jakarta.

"Decent housing in the city has become so expensive, beyond the income of an average worker, so the only choice is to buy a house on the outskirts," a city planning expert at Trisakti University, Yayat Supriatna, told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

More than 70 percent of Jakarta's land area is taken up with landed housing, as opposed to apartments, but with 14,000 people per square kilometer of land, one can safely say the capital "has no more room".

Furthermore, the limited public services the city administration can provide means Jakarta can only support 15 percent to 25 percent of its daytime population of 12 million, Yayat said.

And yet each year at least 250,000 people from around the country arrive in Jakarta looking for work.

"Those with fixed incomes will look for cheaper housing outside of Jakarta, while the poor fill up spaces in the capital that have not been optimized," Yayat said, referring specifically to slum areas on the banks of rivers.

In this respect, population growth in Greater Jakarta is like a donut, with no real growth in the middle but bulging around the edges, he said, adding that transportation was a major problem for those living outside of Jakarta.

So while people living inside Jakarta proper are becoming poorer, those living outside the capital are spending more for transportation.

Yayat warned that if the government failed to deal with the migration of people from rural areas to the capital and the city's transportation woes, Jakarta would face what he called "mass poverty".

"About 50 percent to 60 percent of people's income is already being spent on transportation, especially after the fuel price increases, meaning that they are spending less and less on other necessities," he said.

For years the Jakarta administration has been attempting to deal with the problem of overcrowding, with the most recent effort being house-to-house raids targeting unskilled migrants. However, many experts have criticized these efforts as wasteful and ineffective.

An urban design expert at the Bandung Institute of Technology, Mohammad Danisworo, said raids might offer a short-term remedy but with many people still viewing Jakarta as "the land of opportunity", a longer term solution was needed.

"I believe the mind-set of the people must change, urban values must be dispersed evenly to all parts of the country, and the central government must encourage this through regional autonomy," he said.

With more than 80 percent of the country's money circulating in Jakarta, the central government must push for equal investment opportunities in the regions to create more employment opportunities, Danisworo said.

Yayat agrees: "There must be other cities in the country able to compete with Jakarta, so people do not see the capital as the one and only place to look for work."

"This is a task for the government, not only for Jakarta," Danisworo said.