National Housing and Housing Justice: The Cheap Homes Built by the Government, 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 National Housing.” When it was newly completed in 1985, nobody wanted it.¹

The government’s asking price was NT$67,000 to NT$71,000 per ping, a Taiwan unit of floor area equal to about 3.3 square meters. That was not cheap at the time. Because sales were sluggish, the price was eventually lowered to NT$67,000 per ping, paired with a four-year interest-free loan, before all the units were sold. The longtime borough chief Shih Chung-sheng later recalled that he and his wife emptied their lifetime savings and scraped together a NT$400,000 down payment to buy one of the units.¹

Forty years later, the same address has had an average transaction price of about NT$870,000 per ping over the past year on real-estate brokerage platforms, with the highest unit approaching NT$980,000.² From NT$67,000 to NT$870,000, that is roughly twelve to fourteen times higher. The down payment that once took a lifetime of savings to assemble would not buy even one ping today.

30-second overview: National Housing was Taiwan’s government-built, “built to sell” affordable housing program, legislated in 1975 and intended to help people who could not afford homes get onto the property 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 National Housing units to be sold to anyone. Housing built with public subsidy thus ultimately became private assets for early buyers. In prime districts of Taipei, several National Housing complexes 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 route of government-built housing for sale, while deliberately installing the gate that had been missing: resale may not exceed the original purchase price. The Ministry of the Interior disagrees and advocates returning to “for rent only, not for sale.” Taiwan has argued for fifty years over these two paths of housing justice, “helping you afford to buy” versus “helping you afford to rent,” and the argument still has not ended.

This article is about the fifty years between those two address prices. How did a well-intentioned policy, in which the government spent money building cheap homes to help people get onto the property ladder, end up leaving the next generation at the top of the staircase unable to buy and unable to rent stably?

The Generation of Homes the Government Built to Sell

Taiwan’s earliest approach to the problem of “people cannot afford homes” was to lend people money to build them. Under the Act Governing Loans for the Construction of National Housing, enacted in 1957, the government’s role was more like that of a bank, helping finance people to build homes themselves. 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 act was 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 rent to lower-income families and families of military personnel, civil servants, and teachers.”⁴ In other words, these homes were to be sold to lower-income people and public-sector households, not built for whoever in the market had money to buy them.

Even more crucial was Article 12. Reselling a National Housing unit required approval from the competent authority, and the transferee also had to meet National Housing purchase eligibility requirements.⁴ This clause is the hinge of the entire story. It effectively built a wall around National Housing: the government used subsidies to sell homes cheaply to eligible people, and if those people later wanted to sell, they could sell only to the next eligible person. Homes could change hands, but they would always circulate within the circle of “people who need help.” The discount would not leak outward, and the subsidy could not be cashed out once and carried away by any one person.

📝 Curator’s Note
This wall is the most underestimated, and earliest forgotten, design feature of National Housing. Later criticism that National Housing “enriched early buyers” is not really criticism of the 1975 version. That version had a closed loop, and the subsidy could not escape. What truly drained the subsidy was the later moment when someone manually dismantled this wall. Any article on National Housing that sees only “homes appreciated, buyers profited” misses the most important moment: when, by whom, and why the closed loop was dismantled.

In 1982, the act underwent a major revision, expanding from just over a dozen articles to 45. This amendment added a lock against short-term flipping: after buying National Housing, the owner had to “live there for two full years” before selling.⁵ But it is important to note that the core wall still remained. The transferee still had to meet National Housing eligibility requirements. The two-year occupancy rule was merely to prevent immediate resale; the boundary of the circle was untouched.

If anything truly changed the character of the system in 1982, it was that the door was opened to another group at the same time. To promote sales, National Housing became available for purchase by military personnel, civil servants, and teachers. This produced an ironic turn: the “lower-income families” explicitly named in the original statute as the people to be cared for were pushed back in actual allocation, while public-sector workers with more stable incomes and greater ability to pay down payments became the main buyers. The entrance to cheap housing quietly shifted away from those who needed it most and toward those who were doing reasonably well.

Taipei’s dense residential fabric. The homes built during the National Housing era were often embedded in blocks like these, 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, were people still so eager to win the right to buy a National Housing unit? Because the allocation price was already below market price. Winning a unit was almost like winning the lottery: the moment you got the keys, you held a unit priced roughly 30 percent below market value, and resale could turn that spread into cash.⁶ This atmosphere of “winning a unit is like winning the lottery” was not itself wrong. It was exactly what housing justice should look like: people who could not afford homes could still, through luck and eligibility, get onto the property ladder.

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

In 2002, That Wall Was Dismantled

Many people assume National Housing became a target of speculation the moment military personnel, civil servants, and teachers were allowed to buy it in 1982. The year that truly removed the gate was actually a less discussed one: 2002.

On December 11 that year, the Legislative Yuan amended Article 19 of the National Housing Act. It changed two things. Each looked minor 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 meet National Housing eligibility requirements” was removed.⁷

The wall that had surrounded National Housing since 1975 was pushed down at that moment.

From then on, after living in a National Housing unit for one year, the owner could sell it to anyone. The buyer did not have to be a lower-income household, did not have to be a military member, civil servant, or teacher, and did not have to meet any eligibility requirements. 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.

Here it is necessary to pin down a detail that is often misstated, because it is precisely the key to understanding this gate. The National Housing Act did indeed contain a pricing formula for “the original purchase price minus depreciation” in Article 21, which sounds like an anti-speculation lock limiting resale to cost. But it was not. That formula was the method for calculating how much the government should compensate the original resident when forcibly taking back a violating unit. It had nothing to do with how much an owner could sell the home for on the market.⁵ The accurate statement, therefore, is this: the only anti-speculation device National Housing ever had was the closed loop of “buyer eligibility restrictions,” and that 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 National Housing later gained MRT access, its commercial district matured, and housing prices across Da’an District rose. The National Housing units themselves did not change. They were still the homes built in 1985. But the value of the prime Taipei land beneath them multiplied more than tenfold over three decades. Those who could not scrape together a NT$400,000 down payment back then could not get in. Those who could get in watched the homes in their hands grow into unexpected wealth. Housing built with public subsidy ultimately had all of its appreciation accrue to individuals. That appreciation could have remained in public hands, at least in part, if the wall had still been there.

📝 Curator’s Note
To be fair, the main reason National Housing soared in value was location, not the status of being National Housing itself. Any home in prime Taipei would have risen over thirty years. Away from urban cores, many National Housing complexes are ordinary older homes, or even unsold white elephants. So the real question in this article is not “why should National Housing appreciate?” Of course homes appreciate. The question is: when the government used public money to build housing and subsidize the price gap, why did it not also install a gate so that at least part of the appreciation created by public investment would return to public hands? Hong Kong has an answer. Britain has a lesson. Taiwan left the question blank for fifty full years.

Three Major National Housing Complexes Grew From Cheap Homes Into Luxury Assets

To see the cost of that missing gate, one has to walk into several Taipei addresses. First, one easily misunderstood point: the astonishingly valuable National Housing complexes in prime Taipei districts are not a dramatic story of “low- and middle-income resettlement housing turning overnight into luxury homes.” Their origins were military dependents’ village redevelopment plus allocation to ordinary citizens.

Take Da’an National Housing as an example. Of its 1,296 units, 628 were allocated back to the military, about 48 percent; 186 went to police officers, about 14 percent; and the remaining 479, about 37 percent, were sold to ordinary citizens.² Chenggong National Housing was formerly “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. Original military dependents’ households numbered about 515, roughly 20 percent, and the remaining 80 percent were publicly sold externally.⁸ So the more accurate phrasing is: these were “public housing units sold with government subsidy.” The subsidy flowed to original military dependents and ordinary allocated buyers, rather than low-income resettlement households. But the earlier point still stands: after 1982, the program opened to military personnel, civil servants, and teachers for sales promotion, and genuine low-income households were instead squeezed out. The benefit of cheap housing was not precisely targeted at those who needed it most from the beginning.

Once the origins are clarified, the numbers can land where they should.

Chenggong National Housing cost NT$67,000 per ping during its sluggish sales period in 1985. Today, its average transaction price over the past year on brokerage platforms is about NT$870,000 per ping, making it the only one of Taipei’s three major National Housing complexes that has not yet broken NT$1 million.² Its neighbor, Da’an National Housing, has averaged about NT$960,000 per ping over the past year on brokerage platforms, with some individual units already exceeding NT$1 million. One transaction in November 2025 reached NT$1.05 million per ping.²

The most extreme case is Zhengyi National Housing. It originally housed about 175 military dependents and was located on Section 3 of Zhongxiao East Road, next to SOGO, one of Taipei’s prime commercial areas. After a full 26 years of integration and urban renewal, it became the luxury development “Taipei Star,” with November 2024 transaction prices of NT$2.04 million to NT$2.4 million per ping.² A public housing site that began by housing military dependents ultimately became one of Taipei’s top-tier luxury residences.

There is also Xinlong National Housing next to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. In 1986, its original price was NT$47,000 per ping. By 2022, it was listed on brokerage platforms at about NT$1.058 million per ping,⁹ roughly twenty-two times higher.

📊 National Housing Values: From Allocation Price to Today

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

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

Once these numbers are laid out, the remark made by lawyer Lin Chih-chun in 2025, when criticizing a proposal for “state-funded urban renewal of Chenggong National Housing,” becomes especially sharp. He said it was equivalent to turning “a home with a market value of NT$30 million into a home worth NT$60 million to NT$70 million,” calling it “robbing the poor to help the rich, with the state paying to renovate homes for wealthy people.”¹⁰ Scholars have been colder still: researchers writing at Streetcorner Sociology pointed out that the government’s earlier National Housing was “primarily for sale,” and that housing policy had long aimed to boost homeownership. In the end, housing in Taiwan “has indeed become a tool for accumulating wealth.”¹¹

This is the bill presented fifty years later by the gate that was never installed. The cheap homes built by the government did not become an escalator that kept catching the next person who could not afford a home. They became an elevator that caught only the earliest group to board; once they went up, they pulled the ladder away behind them.

That Gate Is Called a Premium Payment in Hong Kong, and a Lesson in Britain

At this point, a natural objection arises: can the government build cheap homes and sell them to people, while also preventing people from profiting when they sell?

Yes. Neighboring Hong Kong installed precisely the gate Taiwan never did.

Hong Kong’s Home Ownership Scheme, or HOS, works on a logic similar to National Housing: homes are sold to low- and middle-income households at about 60 to 70 percent of market price. But it adds a mechanism called a “premium payment.” If an owner later wants to sell an HOS flat on the open market, they must first pay the government a land premium calculated according to the original discount ratio. In effect, the portion the government gave away through the discount, together with part of the appreciation, is paid back into the public treasury.¹² Appreciation does not all go to the individual; part of it must be returned to the public. Taiwan’s National Housing never had this premium-payment checkpoint. If you bought cheaply, you could sell at full market price after the required occupancy period. The price spread and appreciation in between went cleanly into your own pocket.

Hong Kong’s HOS estate Hoi Fu Court. The Hong Kong government sells HOS flats to low- and middle-income households at about 60 to 70 percent of market price, but it installed a gate Taiwan’s National Housing lacked: the 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 more brutal mirror.

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

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

_London council housing. Thatcher’s 1980 “Right to Buy” sold this kind of public housing to tenants at a discount. Forty years later, Britain’s social-housing share had halved to 16 percent. Photo: Reading Tom, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons._

The more ironic sequel is that 41 percent of the council homes sold back then have now become higher-rent private rental housing.¹³ The government sold homes to tenants at a discount; tenants, or later owners, then rented them back out to others at higher rents. Public subsidy made a full circuit and ultimately pushed up prices in the rental market. Taiwan’s National Housing “elevator that pulled away the ladder” was reproduced in Britain at a scale enlarged by a million homes.

Singapore’s HDB flats, home to about 80 percent of the population. The government built them to “sell,” with 99-year leases. Even with minimum occupation periods, HDB appreciation still became privatized. Photo: Martinpasquier, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Even Singapore, so often treated as the positive example, could not prevent this. Singapore’s government-built HDB flats are “sold” to citizens on 99-year leases, and about 80 percent of the population lives in them. It looks like a model of “homeownership for residents.” But even with minimum occupation periods and resale levies, it has not been able to suppress the privatization of HDB appreciation. Scholar Chua Beng Huat has stated directly that this system of public subsidy, originally intended to flatten inequality, has in practice deepened wealth gaps between generations: early buyers accumulated assets through HDB appreciation, while later generations had to pay higher prices to enter. 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: once the government chooses to “build to sell,” privatized appreciation becomes a shadow that is almost impossible to shake off. The only difference is whether a gate is installed, and how tight it is. Hong Kong installed the premium payment and at least retained part of the value; Singapore installed thresholds, but value still leaked; Britain essentially gave it away, and public stock was taken off the table wholesale. Taiwan’s National Housing sits at the least defended end of this spectrum, without even Hong Kong’s premium-payment gate. That is why, fifty years later, Taiwan has reached a crossroads: either learn from Hong Kong and add the gate, or learn from another path and do not sell at all.

A Pretty 85 Percent Figure, and the Next Generation That Cannot Afford to Buy

By the end of 1999, the National Housing path had already become unsustainable.

The problem was not simply that units could not be sold. National Housing had long been priced too high and located too remotely, with each completed batch becoming another sluggish-selling batch. At the same time, civil society began protesting that the government was “abusing social resources” by building these unsold homes. Under pressure from both sides, the government stopped launching new National Housing projects at the end of 1999.³ This costly, distant, unsellable machine shut down.

After shutting down, National Housing remained on the books for more than a decade until it was formally unplugged in 2015. The Executive Yuan approved the abolition bill 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 rationale was attractive: Taiwan’s homeownership rate had already reached 85 percent, so the mission of “helping people buy homes” was complete, and the next step would be social housing for rent only, not for sale.¹⁵

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

✦ The homeownership rate is 84.4 percent, but hidden inside that number is a large inflated share of people “living with parents,” as well as an entire generation of young people who cannot truly buy homes of their own.

On paper, Taiwan’s homeownership rate is indeed as high as 84.4 percent.¹⁶ The problem is that this figure includes many people “living with parents”: the home belongs to the parents, but young people living inside it are counted as “having owner-occupied housing.” Shift the lens away from that pretty aggregate number and toward the generation that must actually buy its first home independently, and the picture looks completely different.

Nationwide, the house-price-to-income ratio was 8.41 in 2014. By 2024, it had risen to 10.76, an increase of about 28 percent over ten years.¹⁷ By the World Bank’s standard, anything above 5.1 is “severely unaffordable.” Taipei City’s peak in the third quarter of 2024 was 16.60, meaning a Taipei household would have to go more than sixteen years without eating or spending to afford one home.¹⁷

Source: Ministry of the Interior Real Estate Information Platform; NCCU Center for Real Estate Research

Mortgage pressure worsened at the same time. Nationwide, the mortgage-burden ratio was about 36 percent in 2014 and rose to about 47 percent in 2024; Taipei’s latest quarterly figure was about 64 percent.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 safe harbor either: in 2024, the rent index rose 2.45 percent year on year, a new high in 28 years.¹⁸ The age of first-time buyers has aged by a full five years over the past decade, shifting from 30 to 35 toward 35 to 40.¹⁷

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

When these two images are overlaid, cracks appear in the official rationale of 85 percent. At the same moment when the government said “the homeownership rate is 85 percent, mission accomplished,” Chenggong National Housing was approaching NT$1 million per ping, and young people needed more than a decade of income without eating or spending to buy a first home. Eighty-five percent was the previous generation’s stock. A 10.76 price-to-income ratio was the next generation’s admission ticket. A policy declared victory using the former, but left the latter for the next generation to shoulder. The National Housing elevator that pulled away the ladder ultimately trapped precisely the young people standing at the door, unable to buy and unable to rent securely.

In 2016, the Route Changed: The Government Stopped Selling and Switched to Renting

After National Housing was unplugged, Taiwan’s housing justice took a completely different path: the government would no longer build homes to sell to you; it would build homes to rent to you.

The legal foundation of this path was the Housing Act, enacted in 2011 and implemented at the end of 2012. Article 3, Subparagraph 2 defines social housing very rigidly: “social housing” means housing and necessary ancillary facilities “established by the government or established by the private sector with government incentives, exclusively for rental use.”¹⁹ The four words “exclusively for rental use” placed a central-government legal stamp on the “for rent only, not for sale” route. Sale, as an action, was excluded from social housing.

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

When the new government took office in 2016, it turned this route into a flagship policy: 200,000 social housing units in eight years, combining direct construction with a two-track rental intermediation and management program. The later story of how those 200,000 units were built, how rental intermediation and management operated, and how mixed-residence design sought to prevent social housing from being stigmatized is the topic of another article. This article needs only one point: National Housing exited in 2015, social housing took over in 2016, and the main melody of Taiwan’s housing justice shifted from “helping you afford to buy” to “helping you afford to rent.” For how the “for rent only, not for sale” route proceeded and how it performed, see the sister article “Social Housing and Housing Justice.”

After Lai Ching-te took office, he made the slogan bigger: “one million renter households.” Broken down, this meant 130,000 newly added directly built units, accumulating to 250,000 units; 250,000 rental-intermediation and management units; and 500,000 rental-subsidy households.²⁰

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

“Direct construction,” “rental intermediation and management,” and “rental subsidies” are three different things, with vastly different effects. They cannot be added together and presented externally as “social housing results.” Liao Ting-hui of the Organization of Urban Re-s, or OURs, put it directly: “The budget for subsidizing one rental-intermediation and management unit can, on average, subsidize more than two rental-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 talking point both central and local governments like to use.

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

Here, the government also deserves a fair word. A common claim says “Lai Ching-te has not built a single social housing unit.” That is political exaggeration: the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Center did have 1,662 units awarded and underway in 2025.²⁰ But it is also true that progress has fallen far behind the original promise, and that the new plan remains stuck because the Executive Yuan has not yet approved it. Both 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 In

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

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

Taoyuan’s Qingpu Special District, an emerging rezoned area around Airport MRT A18 and A20. Taoyuan’s first batch of affordable housing will be located around these station areas. Photo: Heeheemalu, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But this time, Taoyuan did something National Housing never did in fifty years. It put the gate back in.

The affordable housing ordinance clearly sets out three anti-speculation locks: the resale price may not exceed the original purchase price; transactions must go through the government matching platform; and private resale is prohibited.²³ This is almost exactly the wall dismantled in 2002, rebuilt fifty years later, and built even higher. The old National Housing closed loop only restricted “who you could sell to.” Taoyuan’s version also locks “how much you can sell for.” If you buy cheaply, you can later sell only at the original price, through the government platform, to the next eligible person. Appreciation stays within this circle and cannot be cashed out in one stroke by any one person.

📝 Curator’s Note
Taoyuan’s gate fills in the page of homework that National Housing missed fifty years ago. The biggest breach in National Housing was “buy cheaply, sell at full price, and keep the appreciation in between.” This time, Taoyuan wrote “resale may not exceed the original purchase price” directly into the law, effectively saying to history: that wall should not have been dismantled. From this angle, affordable housing is a reincarnation of National Housing, and also an admission of National Housing’s error: using a legal clause to acknowledge that the elevator should not have pulled away the ladder.

Yet as soon as this path emerged, it collided with the central government.

Afford to Buy, or Afford to Rent: The Central-Local Argument From Afar

The Ministry of the Interior’s position is clear: sale itself is the problem. Deputy Minister Tung Chien-hung directly questioned the direction, saying that “when affordable housing is sale-type housing, relatively speaking it will be able to care for fewer people,” and that “the process of free resale will create disputes over property rights and subsequent administrative-management problems.”²⁴ He advocated returning to the spirit of the Housing Act’s social housing: for rent only, not for sale. Put plainly, the ministry’s view is this: once homes are sold, public stock is lost in one transaction. 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 permanently in government hands for ongoing rental.

The two sides are really describing two different kinds of housing justice.

Taoyuan’s response was to reject the binary frame. Chiang Nan-chih, director 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 visited the Executive Yuan on June 4, 2026 to seek the 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, some can only rent, and the two kinds of need should each be caught, rather than being forced into a binary choice.²⁶

CommonWealth Magazine’s official program: why the Lai government’s promised 130,000 directly built social housing units shrank sharply, seen from one angle on Taiwan’s difficult present of housing justice.

This time, the Executive Yuan did not reject the proposal outright. Premier Cho Jung-tai’s stance clearly softened. He did not veto Taoyuan’s approach, saying only that he hoped “central and local policies can align.”²⁷ A policy route abolished eleven years earlier, with an official rationale already written as “homeownership rate 85 percent, mission complete,” thus reopened the central government’s door through a local government.

_Vienna’s Karl-Marx-Hof, completed in 1933 and still owned by the city government, for rent only and not for sale. If you do not sell for a hundred years, the stock remains in public hands. Photo: C.Stadler/Bwag, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons._

This central-local collision is really an argument over a question that should have been answered fifty years ago, but has always been sidestepped: should the government help people “afford to buy,” or help people “afford to rent”?

Fifty Years Later, Taiwan Finally Learned to Install That Gate

Return to the address of Chenggong National Housing.

In 1985, longtime borough chief Shih Chung-sheng and his wife emptied their savings to scrape together a NT$400,000 down payment and buy a home priced at NT$67,000 per ping. At that moment, National Housing was a complete promise of housing justice: the government built cheap homes to help those who could not afford housing get onto the property ladder. Its only oversight was forgetting to install a gate at the exit: nobody specified how the appreciation later generated by public subsidy and location should be divided. Forty years later, the same address is approaching NT$1 million per ping, the original down payment would not buy even one ping, and the ladder was quietly pulled away beneath the feet of the earliest group to board.

Hong Kong calls that gate a premium payment. Britain learned, at the cost of NT$8 trillion in transferred equity, that it cannot be omitted. Singapore installed thresholds and still leaked value. Taiwan circled around the issue for a full fifty years, even personally dismantling the only half-wall it had in 2002. Only in 2026 did a local government finally write the words “resale may not exceed the original purchase price” into an ordinance called “affordable housing.” That is exactly the gate National Housing failed to install, the one Hong Kong calls a premium payment.

So the real question in this story has never been “can the government afford to build homes?” National Housing proved that the government can build them, and Taoyuan is preparing to build again. The real question is: after “helping you afford to buy,” who should receive the appreciation? The earliest person to board, 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 filling in the final brick of a wall dismantled fifty years ago. Whether that brick can become an escalator that no longer pulls away the ladder, or whether it will again be trapped in a central-local struggle that cannot align, will be recorded for us by the next address price at Chenggong National Housing.

Further Reading:

• Social Housing and Housing Justice — The “for rent only, not for sale” social housing route after 2016: 200,000 units in eight years, the two-track model of direct construction and rental intermediation and management, and how mixed-residence design seeks to prevent social housing from being stigmatized. This is the sister article to this piece, continuing the story after National Housing exited in 2015.
• Taiwan’s Low Birthrate Crisis — Unaffordable housing and the inability to have children are two ends of the same structural fracture, another facet of generational justice.
• Sheet-Metal Rooftop Additions — When people cannot afford to buy and cannot rent stably, how Taiwanese people use the most makeshift methods to add a place of shelter for themselves.
• Taiwan’s Environmental Justice and NIMBY Disputes — Where social housing and unpopular facilities should be built, and the boundary between housing justice and spatial justice.

Open Data

The following government open datasets let you verify, or refute, the arguments in this article yourself. Links point to data.gov.tw or to query systems run by competent authorities. Readers working with AI can also query the same datasets through Taiwan’s open-data MCP gateway, Twinkle Hub.

• Ministry of the Interior Actual-Price Real Estate Transaction Query Service, nationwide actual-price registration（Department of Land Administration, Ministry of the Interior; batch updated every three months; Twinkle Hub dataset code lvr-trades）— This article uses one Chenggong National Housing address to discuss forty years of change. Here you can look up the contemporary transaction price of any National Housing community and verify the slope of that “asset escalator” yourself.
• Taipei City National Housing Allocation and Rental Status（Taipei City Government Department of Urban Development; updated irregularly）— Official records for the allocation and rental of the “cheap homes sold by the government” in the three major National Housing complexes discussed in this article.
• Taipei City Government Social Housing Rental Intermediation and Management Matching Statistics（Taipei City Government Department of Urban Development; updated annually）— Implementation-side numbers for the new route described in “In 2016, the Route Changed: The Government Stopped Selling and Switched to Renting.”

References

Image Sources

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

• Taipei residential skyline, Xiangshan view — Photo: Heeheemalu, 2026, CC BY-SA 4.0（hero）
• Taipei Shilin District apartment streetscape — Photo: 迷惘的人生, 2022, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Hoi Fu Court, To Kwa Wan, Hong Kong, HOS — Photo: Thomasman, 2008, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Brookfield Estate council housing, 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, 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, Vienna — Photo: C.Stadler/Bwag, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Videos: CTS News “716 Ketagalan Boulevard march chants ‘housing justice’” (official YouTube channel), CommonWealth Magazine “Why social housing policy turned,” Understand CommonWealth in 8 Minutes Ep.74 (official YouTube channel)