Once upon a time, Taiwan business people bought very cheap steal from Japan. Lo and behold, it was cheap because it was irradiated. Some beams still are part of our buildings. This partial list gives you a heads up:
Now let’s correlate irradiated buildings, building built on soil prone to liquifaction and any other issues. Then explain to me why is real estate so expensive here.
Lots of people earning income overseas, they are not affected by local wages.
Lack of other easy investment opportunities (apart from saving accounts and the flaky stock market).
No pressure to sell, so sellers can post a high price and wait for years for someone to buy.
Cultural pressure to buy, exploited by builders that run ads that portrait renting as being shameful.
I deleted the links I posted earlier,because they appear to contain the same list(s) as the one(s) Icon posted. Sorry for any confusion I may have caused.
Edited to add:
Yeah, the link I tried in the earlier thread was dead, and I couldn’t bring it up on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
One would hope that the buildings have already been demolished. Alas, no doubt the steel would be recicled in that case… but anyways, given the low rate of demolishing old buildings, especially in Taipei, that is highly unlikely. The demolishing, I mean.
I found a search function/app/device that’s supposed to enable the user to find out whether a given address is that of a radioactive building. I think I followed the instructions (eventually), but I could not get it to work, even after entering an address from one of the lists of radioactive buildings. Nonetheless, I’m pasting the link to the search function here, just in case someone can get it to work:
This is a 2014 Keelung list, containing only two addresses:
After getting an old, dead link to radioactive Keelung houses on the Atomic Energy Council website, I plugged the URL into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and found a downloadable Excel document, dated March 2005, which contained a twelve-item list of Keelung addresses. However, I’ve decided not to put that list up here, and not to link to it, because for all I know it may not be valid anymore.
Here’s an old Taipei Times article from 2001 which might add a little background to the issue (please note that an image which accompanies the article might be not suitable for work by some standards):