Wealthy told to vacate subsidized apartments

Bambang Nurbianto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Vice Governor Fauzi Bowo requested on Friday that all related agencies make a serious reassessment of low-cost apartments which were originally allocated for low-income families, but are now occupied by the well-heeled.

"Those who have no right to live in the low-cost apartments, they should leave (the apartments)," Fauzi told the press.

The statement was made as recent data shows that the majority of low-cost, taxpayer-subsidized apartments here are now occupied by relatively wealthy people.

Many luxury cars can be seen in the parking area of the low- cost apartments, in which construction was subsidized by the city administration.

Such a situation has been allowed to occur because there are many illegal brokers hired and authorized by corrupt city officials who are then given the authority to rent the houses on the open market for a profit.

In some other cases, the low-income families who have the right to the apartment units rent them to rich people at higher prices.

Fauzi asked related officials to make a comprehensive assessment to determine the real financial condition of the tenants at all of the subsidized apartments.

Data from the city housing agency shows that a majority of over 3,600 units owned by the city administration, are not occupied by the people they were intended to cater to.

Director of the city-owned developer PD Sarana Jaya Tebyan A. Maari said that the rental fees for the apartments had been set at only Rp 950 per day (less then Rp 30,000 per month) for units measuring 18 square meters and Rp 2,500 per day for those measuring 21 square meters.

By comparison, the monthly rent for an average room measuring some 16 square meters in most neighborhoods is some Rp 300,000 on average.

Tebyan said that because the rental rate has not been raised since 1988, his company had suffered losses of around Rp 700 million a year as it had to pay the maintenance cost of the apartments. It also subsidizes water, electricity and gas rates.

Therefore, Tebyan proposed that the rental fee be increased by 20 percent.

Even though many people are in dire need of decent housing, there are about 1,000 subsidized apartment units which remain vacant. They include those in Tebet, South Jakarta, Petamburan, Central Jakarta, and Sindang, North Jakarta.

The city housing agency said it was aiming to build 30,000 more units over the next 10 years. Governor Sutiyoso earlier said that around 3,000 apartment units would be built each year, starting in 2002.

Those will be allocated for the people evicted from slum areas, particularly those who live along various riverbanks.

But data from the city housing agency showed that only 428 units were constructed in 2002.

The construction of the low-cost apartments was funded by taxpayers' money. "If they are occupied by rich people, it means that everybody, rich and poor are subsidizing them, and that is simply not fair," Fauzi said.