Public Housing and Housing Justice: Government-Built Cheap Homes, and Whose Asset Escalator They Ultimately Created

On Section 2 of Fuxing South Road in Taipei's Da'an District, there is a housing complex called Chenggong Public Housing. When it was newly completed in 1985, no one wanted it.¹

The government's asking price was NT$67,000 to NT$71,000 per ping, which was not cheap at the time. Because sales were sluggish, the price was eventually cut to NT$67,000 per ping and paired with a four-year interest-free loan before all the units were sold. The old borough chief Shih Chung-sheng later recalled that he and his wife emptied their life savings and pulled together a NT$400,000 down payment to buy one of the units.¹

Today, forty years later, transaction data from real-estate brokerage platforms over the past year shows the same address averaging about NT$870,000 per ping, with the highest unit nearing NT$980,000.² From NT$67,000 to NT$870,000 is roughly a twelve- to fourteen-fold increase. The down payment that once required wiping out a family's savings would not buy even one ping today.

30-second overview: National housing was Taiwan's government-built, for-sale affordable housing program, legislated in 1975 and intended to help people who could not afford homes get onto the ownership ladder. The problem was that it was never fitted with a gate to recapture appreciation; in 2002, even the only anti-speculation mechanism was dismantled, allowing public housing units to be sold to anyone. Homes built with public subsidies therefore became private assets for early buyers, and several public housing complexes in prime Taipei districts now approach, or even exceed, NT$1 million per ping. In 2015, the government abolished the National Housing Act and shifted to social housing that is “for rent only, not for sale.” Yet in May 2026, Taoyuan passed an “affordable housing” ordinance on third reading, reviving the path of government-built housing for sale while deliberately installing the gate that had been absent before: resale may not exceed the original purchase price. The Ministry of the Interior disagrees and argues for returning to “rent only, not sale.” Taiwan has been arguing for fifty years over these two routes to housing justice: helping people buy, or helping people rent.

This article is about the fifty years caught between those two address prices. How did a well-intentioned policy in which the government spent money building affordable homes to help people get on the ladder end up leaving the next generation at the top of that ladder unable to buy and insecure even as renters?

The Generation of Homes the Government Built to Sell

Taiwan's earliest way of addressing “people cannot afford homes” was to lend them money to build. Under the 1957 Regulations on Loans for the Construction of National Housing, the government's role was closer to that of a bank, helping provide financing so people could build their own homes. What truly brought the government into direct construction was the National Housing Act, promulgated on July 12, 1975. On the same day, the old loan regulations were abolished.³

At its core, the 1975 act was a promise of housing justice. The original Article 3 was clear: national housing was “for sale or rental to lower-income households and households of military personnel, civil servants, and public-school teachers.”⁴ In other words, these homes were meant to be sold to lower-income people and military, civil-service, and teaching households, not simply to whoever in the market had money.

Even more important was Article 12. Resale of national housing required approval from the competent authority, and the transferee also had to possess the qualifications to purchase national housing.⁴ This article is the pivot of the whole story. It effectively built a wall around national housing: when the government used subsidies to sell homes cheaply to qualified people, those people, if they later sold, could sell only to the next qualified buyer. Homes could change hands, but they would always circulate within the circle of “people who need help.” The discount would not leak out, and no one could cash out the subsidy in one stroke.

📝 Curator's Note
This wall was the most underestimated and earliest forgotten design in Taiwan's national housing system. Later criticism that national housing “enriched early buyers” does not really apply to the 1975 version. At that time, national housing had a closed loop, and subsidies could not escape. What truly let the subsidies drain away was someone personally dismantling that wall decades later. Any article on national housing that sees only “the home appreciated, the buyer profited” misses the most important moment: when the closed loop was dismantled, by whom, and why.

In 1982, the act underwent a major revision, expanding from a dozen or so articles to 45. This amendment added an anti-flipping lock: anyone who bought national housing had to “reside for two full years” before selling.⁵ But it is important to note that the core wall was still there. The transferee still had to possess national-housing qualifications. The two-year occupancy rule prevented immediate resale, but it did not alter the boundary of the circle.

If anything truly changed the character of the system in 1982, it was that the door was quietly opened to another group. To promote sales, national housing began allowing military personnel, civil servants, and teachers to apply. This produced an ironic turn: the “lower-income households” explicitly named in the law as the people to be helped were, in actual allocation, pushed back, while military, civil-service, and teaching households with more stable incomes and greater ability to pay down payments became the main buyers. The entrance to affordable housing quietly shifted from those who needed it most to those who were doing reasonably well.

Taipei's dense residential fabric. Many homes from the national-housing generation were embedded in streetscapes like this and later rose in value along with their locations. Photo: 迷惘的人生, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Why, then, did people still desperately want to win the lottery for a national-housing unit? Because national housing allocation prices were deliberately held below market prices. Winning a unit was almost like winning the lottery: the moment you received the key, you held a price gap of roughly 30% below market value, which could become cash upon resale.⁶ This atmosphere of “winning an allocation is like winning the lottery” was not itself wrong. It was precisely what housing justice should look like: letting people who could not afford a home get on the ladder through luck and eligibility.

What was wrong was that the vehicle later forgot to close the door.

In 2002, That Wall Was Torn Down

Many people assume national housing became a speculative target at the moment military personnel, civil servants, and teachers were allowed to buy in 1982. The year that truly dismantled the gate was a less often mentioned one: 2002.

On December 11 of that year, the Legislative Yuan amended Article 19 of the National Housing Act. Two changes were made. Each looked small on its own, but together they overturned the fate of national housing. First, the required occupancy period was shortened from two years to one. Second, and fatally, the restriction that “the transferee must possess national-housing qualifications” was removed.⁷

The wall that had enclosed national housing since 1975 was pushed over at that moment.

From then on, after living in a national-housing unit for one year, an owner could sell it to anyone. The buyer did not have to be a lower-income household, a military, civil-service, or teaching household, or meet any eligibility requirement. A home that had originally circulated only among “people who need help” was formally placed into the free market. From that point on, it was no different from the privately purchased apartment next door.

One often-misstated detail needs to be pinned down here, because it is the key to understanding this gate. The National Housing Act did indeed contain a pricing formula based on “the original purchase price minus depreciation” (Article 21), which sounds like an anti-speculation lock requiring resale at cost. But it was not. That formula calculated how much the government had to compensate the original resident when forcibly reclaiming a noncompliant unit. It had nothing to do with how much the owner could sell the home for on the market.⁵ The accurate point is therefore this: the only anti-speculation mechanism in national housing was the closed loop of “buyer qualifications,” and that mechanism was dismantled in 2002. It was not that some “original-price buyback mechanism was loosened.” The difference matters, because it determines whether the criticism is aimed at the right target.

Once the closed loop was dismantled, the rest was left to time and location.

The land under Chenggong Public Housing later gained metro access, the commercial district matured, and property prices across Da'an District rose with it. The public housing itself did not change; it was still the same set of homes from 1985. But the value of the prime Taipei land beneath it multiplied more than tenfold over three decades. Those who could not pull together the NT$400,000 down payment back then could not get in. Those who could get in saw the homes in their hands grow into wealth they had never expected. Homes built with public subsidies ultimately appreciated entirely for private individuals. And that appreciation could have remained at least partly in public hands, if only the wall had stayed in place.

📝 Curator's Note
To be fair, the main reason national housing surged in value was location, not the status of “national housing” itself. Any home in a prime Taipei district would have risen over thirty years. Away from urban cores, many national-housing units are just ordinary older homes, and some are even unsold white elephants. So the real question in this article is not “why should national housing appreciate?” Homes naturally appreciate. The question is: when the government used public money to build homes and subsidize price gaps, why did it not also install a gate so that at least part of the appreciation produced by public investment would return to public hands? Hong Kong has an answer. Britain offers a lesson. Taiwan left the space blank for fifty full years.

Three Major Public Housing Complexes: From Cheap Homes to Luxury Assets

To see the cost of the missing gate, one has to walk into several Taipei addresses. First, a point that is easy to misunderstand: those astonishingly valuable public housing complexes in prime Taipei districts are not dramatic stories of “middle- and low-income resettlement housing becoming luxury housing overnight.” Their origins lie in military dependents' village redevelopment plus allocation to ordinary citizens.

Take Da'an Public Housing as an example. Of its 1,296 units, the military received 628, about 48%; police received 186, about 14%; and the remaining 479, about 37%, were sold to the general public.² Chenggong Public Housing began as “Chenggong New Village.” In 1980, then Army Commander-in-Chief Hau Pei-tsun and Taipei Mayor Lee Teng-hui signed an agreement to redevelop it. The original military dependents' households numbered about 515, around 20%, while the remaining 80% were publicly sold.⁸ So the more precise description is that these were “publicly subsidized housing units sold by the government.” The subsidies flowed to original military dependents' households and ordinary allocation buyers, not to low-income resettlement households that later transformed in status. But the line discussed above still holds: after 1982, sales promotion opened the door to military, civil-service, and teaching households, while truly low-income households were pushed out. The benefits of affordable housing were not accurately targeted to those who needed them most from the start.

Once the origins are clarified, the numbers land with the right force.

Chenggong Public Housing was NT$67,000 per ping when sales were sluggish in 1985. Today, brokerage-platform data for the past year puts its average at about NT$870,000, making it the only one among Taipei's three major public-housing complexes that has not yet crossed NT$1 million per ping.² Its neighbor, Da'an Public Housing, has averaged about NT$960,000 per ping over the past year on brokerage platforms, with individual units already breaking NT$1 million; one November 2025 transaction reached NT$1.05 million per ping.²

The most extreme case is Zhengyi Public Housing. It originally accommodated about 175 military dependents' households. Located on Section 3 of Zhongxiao East Road, next to SOGO, it sits in one of Taipei's most prime commercial districts. After a full 26 years of urban-renewal integration, it became the luxury development “Taipei Star.” In November 2024, its transaction prices were NT$2.04 million to NT$2.4 million per ping.² A public-housing site that began as military dependents' resettlement ultimately became top-tier Taipei luxury housing.

There is also Xinlong Public Housing, next to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. In 1986, it originally cost NT$47,000 per ping; by 2022, brokerage-platform data put it at about NT$1.058 million per ping,⁹ roughly twenty-two times higher.

📊 National Housing Values: From Allocation Prices to Today

Public housing	Starting point (year/original price)	Today (brokerage platforms)
Chenggong Public Housing	1985 / NT$67,000 per ping	Past-year average about NT$870,000
Da'an Public Housing	—	About NT$960,000 over the past year; individual units above NT$1 million
Xinlong Public Housing	1986 / NT$47,000 per ping	About NT$1.058 million in 2022
Zhengyi Public Housing	Resettled 175 military dependents' households	NT$2.04 million-NT$2.4 million after urban renewal (2024/11)

(All housing prices are drawn from brokerage-platform transaction information, not official statistics.)

Laid out this way, the line that lawyer Lin Chih-chun used in 2025 to criticize a proposal for “state-funded urban renewal of Chenggong Public Housing” sounds especially piercing. He said it was equivalent to turning “a home with a market value of NT$30 million into a NT$60 million to NT$70 million home,” amounting to “robbing the poor to aid the rich, with the state paying to renovate homes for wealthy people.”¹⁰ Academia has been even colder in its assessment: researchers at Streetcorner Sociology note that the government's earlier national housing was “primarily for sale,” and that housing policy consistently aimed to raise the homeownership rate. In the end, housing in Taiwan “is indeed a tool for accumulating wealth.”¹¹

This is the bill presented fifty years later by the gate that was never installed. Government-built cheap housing did not become an escalator that continuously caught the next person who could not afford a home. It became an elevator that caught only the earliest riders. After they went up, they pulled up the ladder.

In Hong Kong, That Gate Is Called a Land Premium; in Britain, It Is Called a Lesson

At this point, a natural question arises: is it possible for the government to build affordable homes and sell them to people, but not allow those people simply to sell and profit?

It is possible. Hong Kong, next door, installed the gate Taiwan never did.

Hong Kong's government promotes Home Ownership Scheme flats with a logic much like Taiwan's national housing: sell homes to middle- and lower-income households at 60% to 70% of market price. But it adds a mechanism called a “premium payment.” If an owner later wants to sell a Home Ownership Scheme flat on the open market, the owner must first pay the government a land premium calculated according to the original discount ratio, effectively returning the government's earlier concession, along with part of the appreciation, to the public treasury.¹² Appreciation does not go entirely to the individual; a portion must be returned to the public. Taiwan's national housing never had such a land-premium checkpoint. If you bought cheaply, then after meeting the occupancy period you could sell at full market price, with the price gap and appreciation flowing cleanly into your own pocket.

Hoi Fu Court, a Hong Kong Home Ownership Scheme estate. Hong Kong's government sells HOS flats to middle- and lower-income households at 60% to 70% of market price, but it sets a gate that Taiwan's national housing lacked: premium payment. Photo: Thomasman, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

If Hong Kong is the homework Taiwan should have copied but did not, Britain is a harsher mirror.

In 1980, Margaret Thatcher's government introduced Right to Buy, allowing council-housing tenants to buy the public homes they lived in at steep discounts. The policy was enormously popular, and around 1.9 million council homes were sold. What was the cost? Britain's social-housing share fell from 31% in 1980 to 16% in 2023, roughly cut in half.¹³ Once public stock is sold to individuals, it does not come back. The think tank Common Wealth calculated that the value of the equity given away through those “discounts” alone reached £194 billion, roughly NT$8 trillion. Its original wording was:

✦ "The equity given away through the discount is worth £194 billion..." — think tank Common Wealth

_London council housing. Thatcher's 1980 Right to Buy sold this type of public housing to tenants at discounts. Forty years later, Britain's social-housing share had been cut in half to just 16%. Photo: Reading Tom, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons._

The even more ironic aftermath is that 41% of the council homes sold back then have now become higher-rent private rentals.¹³ The government sold homes to tenants at discounts, and tenants or subsequent buyers then rented them back out to others at higher rents. Public subsidy went in a circle and ultimately pushed up rental-market prices. Taiwan's national-housing “elevator that pulled up the ladder” is, in Britain, a version enlarged a million times.

Singapore's HDB flats, where around 80% of citizens live. The government builds homes for “sale” on 99-year leases. Even with minimum occupancy periods, it has still been unable to stop privatized appreciation of HDB flats. Photo: Martinpasquier, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Even Singapore, so often treated as the positive example, cannot stop this dynamic. The Singapore government builds and “sells” Housing and Development Board flats to citizens on 99-year leases, with around 80% of citizens living in HDB flats. It looks like a model student of “home ownership for residents.” Yet even with minimum occupancy periods and resale levies, it has been unable to suppress privatized appreciation of HDB flats. Scholar Chua Beng Huat states directly that this system of public subsidies, originally intended to flatten inequality, has in practice deepened intergenerational wealth gaps: early buyers accumulate assets through HDB appreciation, while later generations must pay higher prices to buy. Locals have a vivid phrase for the buy-and-sell cycle of HDB flats: “two bites of the cherry.”¹⁴

📝 Curator's Note
Looking at Hong Kong, Britain, and Singapore together reveals one thing: whenever the government chooses to “build for sale,” privatized appreciation becomes an almost inescapable shadow. The difference lies only in whether a gate is installed and whether it is tight enough. Hong Kong installed premium payments and at least retained part of the value. Singapore set thresholds but still leaks value. Britain essentially gave it away, and public stock was carried off wholesale. Taiwan's national housing sits at the least defended end of this spectrum, lacking even Hong Kong's premium-payment gate. That is why, fifty years later, Taiwan has arrived at a crossroads: either learn from Hong Kong and add the gate back, or take another path and simply do not sell.

A Pretty 85%, and a Next Generation That Cannot Afford to Buy

By the end of 1999, the national-housing path had already become unsustainable on its own.

The problem was not simply that units could not be sold. National housing had long suffered from prices that were too high and locations that were too remote; each new batch was completed only to stagnate. At the same time, civil society began protesting the government's “abuse of social resources” in building these unsold homes. Caught between these two forces, the government stopped launching new national-housing projects at the end of 1999.³ This expensive, distant, unsellable machine shut down.

After shutting down, national housing lay on the books for more than a decade before the plug was formally pulled in 2015. The Executive Yuan passed the abolition proposal on March 14, 2013; the Legislative Yuan passed it in December 2014; and on January 7, 2015, the National Housing Act was formally abolished.¹⁵ The official reason was appealing: Taiwan's homeownership rate had already reached 85%, so the mission of “helping people buy homes” was complete, and the next step was to shift toward social housing that was for rent only, not for sale.¹⁵

That figure of 85% is the part of the whole story most worth pausing over.

✦ The homeownership rate is 84.4%, but hidden inside that number is a large inflation effect from people counted as homeowners because they “live with their parents,” along with a whole generation of young people who cannot truly buy homes of their own.

Numerically, Taiwan's homeownership rate is indeed as high as 84.4%.¹⁶ The problem is that this number includes many people living with their parents: the home belongs to the parents, the young person lives in it, and the young person is counted as living in an owner-occupied home. Shift the lens away from this pretty aggregate figure and toward the generation that actually has to buy its first home, and the picture looks completely different.

Taiwan's national house-price-to-income ratio was 8.41 in 2014 and had risen to 10.76 by 2024, an increase of about 28% in ten years.¹⁷ By World Bank standards, anything above 5.1 is “severely unaffordable.” Taipei City's peak in the third quarter of 2024 was 16.60: a Taipei household would have to spend more than sixteen years without eating or drinking to buy one home.¹⁷

資料來源：Ministry of the Interior Real Estate Information Platform; National Chengchi University Center for Real Estate Research

Mortgage pressure has worsened in parallel. The national mortgage-burden ratio was about 36% in 2014 and rose to about 47% in 2024; Taipei City's latest quarterly figure was about 64%.¹⁷ In other words, if a Taipei household grits its teeth and buys a home, nearly two-thirds of its monthly income goes to mortgage payments. The rental market has not become a shelter either: in 2024, the rent index rose 2.45% year on year, a 28-year high.¹⁸ The age of first-time homebuyers has also shifted upward by about five years over the past decade, from 30-35 to 35-40.¹⁷

Official CTS News report: in July 2023, civic groups marched on Ketagalan Boulevard calling for “housing justice.” The generational anxiety of being unable to buy and insecure as renters is the long tail left by the gate that national housing never installed.

Overlay these two images, and cracks appear in the official reason of 85%. At the same time the government declared “homeownership rate 85%, mission accomplished,” Chenggong Public Housing was approaching NT$1 million per ping, and young people needed more than a decade of not eating or drinking to buy their first home. The 85% was the previous generation's stock. The 10.76 ratio was the next generation's entry ticket. A policy declared victory using the former and left the latter for the next generation to shoulder. The national-housing elevator that pulled up the ladder ultimately trapped precisely the young people standing at the door, unable to buy and insecure even as renters.

In 2016, Taiwan Changed Routes: The Government Stopped Selling and Switched to Renting

After the plug was pulled on national housing, Taiwan's housing justice took a completely different route: the government would no longer build homes to sell to you, but would instead build homes to rent to you.

The legal foundation for this route is the Housing Act, enacted in 2011 and implemented at the end of 2012. Article 3, Subparagraph 2 defines social housing very narrowly: “Social housing refers to housing and necessary ancillary facilities established by the government or established by private actors with government incentives, exclusively for rental use.”¹⁹ Those words, “exclusively for rental use,” amount to a stamp from central law confirming the “rent only, not sale” route. The act of selling was excluded from social housing.

Minglun Social Housing in Taipei. After 2016, Taiwan's main housing-justice instrument became this kind of “rent only, not sale” social housing: government-owned and rented out, no longer sold outright to residents. Photo: Solomon203, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

After the new government took office in 2016, it elevated this route into a flagship policy: 200,000 social-housing units in eight years, combining direct construction with a parallel subleasing-and-management system. The subsequent story, how those 200,000 units were to be built, how subleasing and management would operate, and how mixed-tenure design could prevent social housing from being stigmatized, belongs to another article. For this article, one point is enough: national housing exited in 2015, social housing took over in 2016, and Taiwan's main theme of housing justice shifted from “helping you buy” to “helping you rent.” (For how this rent-only route has unfolded and how well it has worked, see the companion piece “Social Housing and Housing Justice.”)

After Lai Ching-te took office, he made the slogan even larger: “one million renter households.” Broken down, this meant 130,000 newly directly built units and a cumulative 250,000 directly built units, plus 250,000 units under subleasing and management, plus rent subsidies for 500,000 households.²⁰

⚠️ Three Types of “Social Housing” Cannot Be Added Together

“Direct construction,” “subleasing and management,” and “rent subsidies” are three different things, with vastly different effects. They cannot be added together and presented publicly as “social-housing achievements.” Liao Ting-hui of the Organization of Urban Re-s is blunt: “The budget used to subsidize one subleased-and-managed unit can, on average, subsidize more than two rent-subsidy households.”²¹ The same money, used through different tools, can serve more than twice as many households. Adding the three together to report an attractive total is a rhetorical device both central and local governments like to use.

Moreover, this large number later shrank on its own. In December 2025, the National Land Management Agency revised the promised 130,000 directly built units down to 40,000.²² Officials called it a pragmatic adjustment; civic groups called it a broken promise. As of September 2025, officials said Taiwan had 222,000 social-housing units nationwide, but that number was assembled from “121,000 directly built units, including those under construction and already awarded” plus “101,000 effective subleasing-and-management contracts.”²⁰ The number of newly awarded units that year by the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Center in 2025 was 1,662.²⁰

Here, fairness to the government is also necessary. A common claim says “Lai Ching-te has not built a single social-housing unit.” That is political exaggeration; in 2025, the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Center did indeed have 1,662 awarded units underway.²⁰ But it is also true that progress has fallen far behind the original promise, and that the new plan is still stuck without Executive Yuan approval. Both the central and local governments have their own talking points. This article presents both sides and endorses neither.

In 2026, Taoyuan Brought Sale Back and Put the Gate Back On

After “rent only, not sale” had been the main theme for ten years, in 2026 someone picked up again the discarded path of “government-built homes for sale.” That someone was Taoyuan.

On May 29, 2026, the Taoyuan City Council passed the Taoyuan City Affordable Housing Development and Management Self-Government Ordinance on third reading across party lines, and in June sent it to the Executive Yuan for approval.²³ This “affordable housing” is structurally a revived version of national housing: the government builds homes and sells them to people at about 50% to 60% of market price, in the NT$200,000s per ping, targeting married or child-rearing households aged 25 to 44 who have had household registration in Taoyuan for at least one year and own no home. The first batch, about 107 units, is located around Airport MRT stations A18 and A20, with a target of building 3,000 units in three to four years.²³

Taoyuan's Qingpu Special District, an emerging redevelopment area around Airport MRT stations A18 and A20. Taoyuan's first affordable-housing units are located around this station area. Photo: Heeheemalu, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But this time, Taoyuan did something national housing had failed to do for fifty years. It put the gate back on.

The affordable-housing ordinance clearly writes in three anti-speculation locks: the resale price may not exceed the original purchase price, transactions may occur only through the government's matching platform, and private resale is prohibited.²³ This is almost exactly the wall torn down in 2002, rebuilt fifty years later and made even higher. The old national-housing closed loop restricted only “who you can sell to.” Taoyuan this time also locks down “how much you can sell for.” If you buy cheaply, you can later sell only at the original price, through the government's platform, to the next qualified buyer. Appreciation stays within this circle and may not be cashed out by anyone in one stroke.

📝 Curator's Note
Taoyuan's gate effectively fills in the missing page of homework that national housing left blank fifty years ago. The largest breach in national housing was “buy cheaply, sell at full price, and keep the appreciation privately.” Taoyuan has now written “resale may not exceed the original purchase price” directly into law, effectively saying to history: that wall should not have been dismantled. From this angle, affordable housing is a revival of national housing, and also an admission of error by national housing: a legal clause acknowledging that the elevator should not have pulled up the ladder.

But the moment this route emerged, it collided with the central government.

Affordable to Buy, or Affordable to Rent: The Central-Local Argument

The Ministry of the Interior's position is clear: sale itself is the problem. Deputy Minister Tung Chien-hung directly questioned the direction, saying: “When affordable housing is for-sale housing, relatively speaking, fewer people can be served,” and “in the process of free resale, disputes over property rights and subsequent administrative-management problems will arise.”²⁴ He argued for returning to the Housing Act's spirit of social housing that is “for rent only, not for sale.” Put plainly, the ministry's view is this: once homes are sold, public stock is lost in a single stroke. Rather than trying every possible way to manage “what happens after sale,” it is better not to sell in the first place and to keep the homes in government hands forever as rentals.

The two sides are actually talking about two different forms of housing justice.

Taoyuan's response is to reject the binary framing. Chiang Nan-chih, director-general of Taoyuan's Department of Urban Development, said: “The promotion of housing justice should not fall into a single ‘choose one of two’ logic.”²⁵ Mayor Chang San-cheng personally went to the Executive Yuan on June 4, 2026, to seek inclusion of Taoyuan's affordable housing in central policy. According to media reports, he described affordable housing and social housing as the “two wings” of housing policy, complementary rather than competitive: some people want to buy, others can only rent; each type of need should be met, instead of being forced into an either-or choice.²⁶

Official CommonWealth Magazine program: why the Lai administration's promised 130,000 directly built social-housing units shrank sharply, offering one view of Taiwan's difficult current state of housing justice.

This time, the Executive Yuan did not reject the idea outright. Premier Cho Jung-tai's attitude clearly softened; he did not veto Taoyuan's approach and only expressed hope that “central and local policies can be aligned.”²⁷ A policy route abolished eleven years earlier, with its official reason already written as “homeownership rate 85%, mission accomplished,” has unexpectedly reopened the central government's door through a local government.

_Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, completed in 1933 and still owned by the city government, for rent only and not for sale. If it is not sold for a hundred years, the stock remains in public hands. Photo: C.Stadler/Bwag, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons._

The central-local clash is fundamentally about a question that should have been answered fifty years ago but was repeatedly bypassed: should the government help people “afford to buy,” or help people “afford to rent”?

Fifty Years Later, Taiwan Has Finally Learned to Install That Gate

Return to the Chenggong Public Housing address.

In 1985, old borough chief Shih Chung-sheng and his wife emptied their savings to assemble a NT$400,000 down payment and buy a home at NT$67,000 per ping. At that moment, national housing was a complete promise of housing justice: the government built affordable homes to help people who could not afford to buy get on the ladder. Its only oversight was forgetting to install an exit gate: no one specified how, when the home later appreciated, the price gap produced by public subsidies and location should be divided. So forty years later, the same address is nearing NT$1 million per ping, the original down payment can no longer buy even one ping, and the ladder was quietly pulled up beneath the feet of the earliest riders.

Hong Kong calls that gate a premium payment. Britain learned at the cost of NT$8 trillion in equity that the gate cannot be omitted. Singapore installed thresholds and still leaked value. Taiwan went in circles for a full fifty years, even personally dismantling its only half-wall in 2002, before a local government finally wrote the words “resale may not exceed the original purchase price” into an ordinance called “affordable housing” in 2026. That is precisely the gate national housing never installed, the one Hong Kong calls a premium payment.

So the real question in this story was never “can the government afford to build homes?” National housing proved the government could build them, and Taoyuan is preparing to build again. The real question is, after “helping you buy,” who should receive the appreciation: the first person to get on the ladder, or the next generation still waiting at the door?

The people who pressed the voting buttons on the day the Taoyuan City Council passed the ordinance on third reading may not have realized that they were also placing the final brick in a wall torn down fifty years ago. Whether that brick can become an escalator that no longer pulls up the ladder, or whether it will once again be trapped in a struggle where central and local governments cannot align, will be recorded for us by the next address price at Chenggong Public Housing.

Further Reading:

• Social Housing and Housing Justice — The “rent only, not sale” social-housing route after 2016: 200,000 units in eight years, direct construction and subleasing-management in parallel, and how mixed-tenure design can prevent social housing from being stigmatized. This article's companion piece, continuing the story after national housing exited in 2015.
• Taiwan's Low Birthrate Crisis — Being unable to afford housing and being unable to have children are two ends of the same structural rupture, another face of intergenerational justice.
• Corrugated Metal Rooftop Additions — When people can neither buy nor rent securely, how Taiwan's residents use the most makeshift methods to add a place to shelter themselves.
• Taiwan's Environmental Justice and NIMBY Controversies — Whose neighborhood should social housing and unwanted facilities be built near? The intersection of housing justice and spatial justice.

References

Image Sources

This article uses eight Creative Commons-licensed images, all cached under public/article-images/society/ to avoid hotlinking source servers; it also embeds two official-channel videos (CTS News and CommonWealth Magazine).

• Taipei residential skyline from Xiangshan — Photo: Heeheemalu, 2026, CC BY-SA 4.0 (hero)
• Apartment street scene in Shilin District, Taipei — Photo: 迷惘的人生, 2022, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Hoi Fu Court, Home Ownership Scheme estate in To Kwa Wan, Hong Kong — Photo: Thomasman, 2008, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Brookfield Estate council housing in London — Photo: Reading Tom, CC BY 2.0
• HDB flats in Singapore's Lavender district — Photo: Martinpasquier, 2014, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Minglun Social Housing in Taipei — Photo: Solomon203, 2023, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Taoyuan Qingpu HSR Special District skyline — Photo: Heeheemalu, 2023, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Karl-Marx-Hof social housing in Vienna — Photo: C.Stadler/Bwag, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Videos: CTS News “July 16 Ketagalan Boulevard March Calls for ‘Housing Justice’” (official YouTube channel), CommonWealth Magazine “Why Did Social-Housing Policy Turn?” 8 Minutes to Understand CommonWealth Ep.74 (official YouTube channel)