More than 600,000 elderly people live alone — a new high, the latest data from the Ministry of the Interior’s Real Estate Information Platform showed.
In the fourth quarter of last year, the number of households composed of only people aged 65 or older surpassed 800,000 for the first time at 803,600, compared with 774,100 in the third quarter of the previous year.
About 611,800 of these households had elderly people living alone, accounting for about 76 percent.
Photo: Taipei Times
The number of households with two elderly people was 174,800, or 21.75 percent, while those with three elderly people or more totaled about 17,000 units, or 2.12 percent,the data showed.
About 23.87 percent of housing units had elderly people who had to care for another elderly person.
As the demand for retirement homes is much greater than their supply in Taiwan, elderly people tend to live alone, real-estate expert Ho Shih-chang (何世昌) said.
Elderly people living alone are targeted by scammers, while old houses aged 30 or older might be required to be reconstructed, he said.
As Taiwan has become a super-aged society this year, a shortage of healthcare workers poses a greater risk than the overall labor shortage, Colliers International Taiwan’s Landlord Representation Services director Andy Huang (黃舒衛) said.
Housing policies must address such problems by proposing realistic and feasible long-term care programs and schemes to provide life services for elderly people, he said.
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