Does anyone own these buildings? It seems to me that there should be a time period to bring them up to code instead of immediately forcing people out without enough time to find a new place. I’m reading that some of these folks have been in their buildings for 10-15 years. Unless the real motivation has nothing to do with unsafe buildings?
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Well, usually the buildings are sold as “investments”, like the one in the big fire, had 3 previous owners, all massive landlords. I see those adds around real estate agencies and fire poles alike: buy a renatl unit with 6, 8, 12 , 24 tenants.
I bet you at least 95% of those illegal partitions/properties are rentals. Yes, epopel live 10 plus years in rentals. heck, I have lived 18 years in my place.
And then we have no code for such illegal dwellings. The law says no buildings on the rooftops. The law says you must register additioons and additiions cannot be made over certain height. yet people add rooms as if they were pidgeon cages…
I guess they were given enough time to move out, but they didn’t take it seriously until the last moment.
Remember those gossips circulating around, about that “National Ranking System” which will turn China into that famous Black Mirror episode?
how much of a public outrage is there to these 9 deaths? thats not a small number. and the cause is directly related to landlord greed and government neglect. it would have been preventable if this grey area of the law had real fucks given about it. my guess is the outrage is very little.
and they say that they are trying to get a further 200 illegal additions taken down. but thats nothing in the grand scheme of things. thats not even 1 streets worth of sheet metal houses. its not even noticeable.
Well, they did try to deflect the issue, since it was technically arson. But teh fact remains that these people died horribly becauase of negligence, it was preventable, there could have been a escape route if they were not piled up like egg crates instead of human beings. In general, society is showing less patience with those greedy landlords.
Do teh Math: each eprson was paying 5000 NTD at least, there were 25 rooms. The landlord doe snot pay taxes on the renatls because they never pay taes. Does not invest in paint , maybe bare minimum repairs. An apartment in thsoe areas could be tops 30k a month because of the age of te building. This landlord is making several times that amount. A bit too much without consideration. She could have opened up a window. Most of the deaths ocusrred in the inner rooms without windows.
And before you say free market and all, what otehr options are there? For a 20k or less earner, the difefrence between paying 4000 without a window instead of 5000 with one is crucial. We can say they made their choice, but the fact is that the law should be there so they do not have to. Sleeping in the street would be safer then.
Add that drunken drivers and other people who should be punished but aren’t. Like the professor who raped his student and engaged ina relationship with her…since she was 11. Girl si totally brainwashed and damaged emotionally and mentally for life, toatlly dependent on her captor.
OTOH, this is the season for fires and heart attacks. I live between two hospitals and there is this influx of ambulances and firetrucks on cold days. Most old houses are death traps in case of fire because of the bars and stuff in balconies and stairwells. But the homes cannot be renewed because they are rentals, the landlord has no interest in fixing or renewing because it is not profitable nor there are any regulations forcing them to do so, the renter cannot do the necessary repairs because for starters that is not their home and they probably do not have enough money for that, earning 20K. Hence, every winter the tragedies rise like fumes… and eveaporate as quickly. Though now it seems to linger like the polution. We’ll see if anything changes.
It’s not only in Taiwan, I saw and have been in one of the building’s attic near the Eiffel tower, wouldn’t want to live there, but people do. Tens of ‘rooms’ on the attics with one or two shared showers/squatting toilets.
"Sophia moved to Paris two years ago from her native Rio de Janeiro. She lives in a converted storage room on the sixth floor of her landlord’s building, close to the Champs Elysées. The room, which has a sink, measures less than 5 square metres and costs Sophia €350 (£290) per month, or €70 per square metre.
There used to be a kitchen in the corridor, until her landlords ripped it out after trying to force her to leave. “One night I came home to find they had used a lock I don’t have the key for. I had to call a locksmith to open my home, which cost €400. So I didn’t have enough to pay my rent the next month.”
Sophia is unable to find alternative lodgings due to her modest revenue. “If I could leave, I would – trust me, I have looked. When I first arrived, I thought these small, expensive spaces were the norm in Paris. It’s only when I brought a friend here one day and he explained it is illegal to rent out this sized room that I realised I was being abused.”
This is much more shocking than the rent. I hope locksmiths here don’t read this article and discover how much they’re undercharging.
Those Brazilians are all over Europe living like that, I think they are used to it in some of the hovels there.
And of course it’s not just the 21st century. Dickens fans should be rejoicing, now that the 20th century fad of hating on the 19th is finally ending! 
All this hand-wringing over substandard housing. Throw the filthy buggers out into the street. They’ll be safer there!
And of course there’s plenty of affordable housing in Taipei anyway. Right? Why, they’re building the stuff all the time. Oh wait…
I was telling one of the vendors that finally our eyesores would be gone. She says no, they are legal, those metallic structures have been here over 20 years, they can’t be demolished.
Sigh.
If we could enforce a l;aw that a structure is illegal when it is unsafe, then we’d have a starter point. Something against windowless boxes. Maybe throw in prohibition of metal walls.
Did anyone see today’s United Daily? A real feat of a house, opriginally two stories, built dove dwelling style into a 6 story multirental. Lots of dough it produces, from the looks of it, none has been put in since… when snakes had legs.
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Wow, Ko-P’s got some serious brass cojones! This is gonna be an epic battle.
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Ko has been saying that he will tear down the illegal structures that have safety concerns for 3 years and how many have been actually demolished?
It seems to me that foreigners are just as easily fooled by politicians as locals.
Yeah but you consider anything that Ko says or does as wrong, so who cares? If tomorrow he announced that in his spare time he developed a vaccine for Aids, you’d probably claim that he did so in order to help his rich friends from pharma companies and that a proper mayor shouldn’t have any spare time.
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Don’t be ridiculous I never said so.
The bottom line is he’s just as bad as any other politicunt in Taiwan. Sorry but that is true.
Gonna be some unhappy former residents. Wonder how many of them vote. And expect to see more winos in the parks and underpasses.
At least it’s a borderline tropical country. If you must be homeless, be homeless where the snowdrifts don’t bury you as you sleep.
(Do you you still remember December’s foggy freeze?)
Results, it’s all about results. So we’ll see. 
I think we’ve already seen the results. His mayoralty is almost ending and what has he done about the illegal constructions? Nothing but empty words.