With three weeks left until the legislative and presidential elections, the political debates are centered around the controversy surrounding presidential candidates’ properties.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have been targeting the gray-zone status of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Vice President William Lai’s (賴清德) old family home, while claiming it to be an illegal structure and with wordplay on Lai’s family name calling it a “shameless shack” (賴皮寮).
Built in an old coal mining area of New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里), Lai’s family home was originally a coal miner’s shack, as his father and grandfather were coal miners. A wooden shack was built in the early 1900s, which was later reconstructed as a brick house by Lai’s father.
The government registered the structure as a miner’s house in 1958, two years before Lai’s father’s death in a mining accident, and the building received a house number in the 1970s.
As non-urban land zoning began in 1975 following the promulgation of the Regional Planning Act (區域計畫法) a year earlier, the land the house sits on was associated with the Wanli Sixth Tunnel Coal Mine (萬里六坑煤礦) and designated a part of the mining area.
The mining license of the Wanli Sixth Tunnel Coal Mine was canceled in 1988. Following that, the row of miners’ houses took on an ambiguous status.
There are thousands of housing units in New Taipei City’s Wanli, Jinshan (金山), Rueifang (瑞芳) and Pingsi (平溪) districts that have the same ambiguous status as Lai’s old family home.
A former Rueifang township mayor told the media that thousands of households on mining land in the town had faced problems in the 1990s and 2000s.
With the support of then-Taipei County commissioner Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), about 3,000 houses were legalized through a special program, but the problem remains with Lai’s family home and hundreds of other houses in the old mining area.
Lai previously said his family home had obtained a house number in about 1970, before the implementation of urban planning in northern Taiwan in 1981.
He also said that the house had been renovated in 2003 due to water leakage, which was before the New Taipei City Government promulgated its guidelines for issuing legal housing proof in 2011.
Whether housing units predating the laws about them should be considered “illegal structures” in the same way as ones that were secretly constructed or expanded by abusing existing laws is something that the public needs to discuss.
An example of the latter is the case of farmland in Hsinchu County, copurchased by TPP Chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) in 2008. Last week, that piece of land was found to be paved with concrete and leased as a parking lot to a bus company.
Many military dependents’ villages — also known as juan cun (眷村) — which are residential compounds set up to house soldiers and their families, faced similar issues in the 1970s.
The Cabinet in 1977 implemented a policy for the military and local governments to work together in providing land and constructing new public housing complexes for the residents.
The debates concerning Lai’s family home could serve the public’s interest by focusing on how laws could be amended to protect the rights of retired miners and their descendants living in decades-old housing units. Many of these people are economically vulnerable. If politicians are unable to provide them with the substantial support they gave years ago to the residents of military dependents’ villages, they should at least offer these people guidance on housing renovation, instead of ignoring the history and coldheartedly labeling their houses “illegal structures” just for electoral gains.
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