The life of Mrs. Ma, who comes from a well-educated family, has been a tale of woe. Her two daughters became seriously ill as infants. She spent all of her assets on treating them, but they ended up severely mentally and physically handicapped. Luckily public housing became a safe harbor where she could protect her daughters. But now she faces the “double elderly” challenge: she herself is very old and should be receiving care, yet she remains the primary caregiver for her two middle-aged daughters.

“As long as I can still move, I will look after my two daughters.” But Mrs. Ma’s determination is facing a severe test as she herself becomes elderly.

There are four locations in Tai­pei City like An­kang where low-income families like Ma’s can apply to live rent free. The other three are Fu­min Public Housing in Wan­hua, ­Yanji Public Housing in Da’an, and the Da­tong Community on Yang­ming­shan in Bei­tou. Altogether they have 1448 units holding around 4000 residents.

An­kang has 1024 of these units, tiny apartments of 40–46 square meters. It is precisely the fact that An­kang creates such a high concentration of poor families that was long the focal point of calls to tear the project down.

Those in favor of razing the community said that the high concentration of very poor households breeds crime, makes management difficult, and feeds the cycle of poverty. Their opponents retorted that low-income households need some safe and secure place to live, where, with case-by-case guidance from social workers, they can be helped to escape from poverty and get back into the mainstream of society.

The problem with the latter argument was that over the years, people have not in fact transitioned out of An­kang at the rate that had originally been expected or hoped for.

Li ­Lingzi, a social work supervisor for Tai­pei City, says that people who live in free public housing come from all sorts of backgrounds. Two working parents, or young single parents, will probably be able to afford to leave public housing when their children grow up and leave the nest. But if the household includes an elderly person or a mentally or physically challenged person, it is unlikely they will ever get the money together to move on, and they will stay indefinitely.

According to the Taipei City Department of Social Welfare, a high proportion of the residents live in dysfunctional families. Besides poverty, there are also problems such as alcoholism, drug addiction, unemployment, domestic violence, intergenerational conflict, and children left living with grandparents, all linked together and reinforcing each other.

“It takes a lot of time to change people’s lives in a lasting way. You have to slowly build up trust and you have to really understand every nuance of their lives, in order to help disadvantaged families find some purpose in life and the motivation to move forward. In fact, monetary social-welfare subsidies are purely secondary,” says Kate Yeong-Tsyr Wang, a professor with the Graduate Institute of Social Work at National Taiwan Normal University. There are only a limited number of social workers to help the residents here, so it is quite a challenge for them to handle all the responsibilities of counseling and managing their clients and looking after their daily needs. This is why the city government commissioned nongovernmental organizations to move in and develop programs focused on the needs of the elderly, young people, children, and so on.

At the end of 2011, after taking into account a variety of viewpoints, the city government decided to completely rebuild the An­kang public housing complex. The new estate will include not only the current grounds but will also incorporate a next-door market and parking lot, for a total land area of 3.52 hectares. The total budget is NT$13.4 billion, and the city government will begin accepting bids in 2013 for phase one of the design and construction. To increase the total number of units in the complex, the city government has altered the local zoning regulations to raise the floor area ratio limit to 4.5. The current four-story apartment buildings will be replaced by 18-story apartment complexes, with a total capacity of 3336 households.

The post-reconstruction An­kang will remain home to the current poor residents, who will occupy 30% of the units. The remaining 70% will be reserved for young families and single people (20–45) on a rental basis. This means that Ankang will no longer be exclusively “social welfare housing,” but will nonetheless have far more disadvantaged families than other projects currently being built by the city for rental to young people (see previous article).

Already some people are raising concerns about post-­reconstruction An­kang. How can quality of life be ensured even as the density of residents rises? What needs to be included in the new project to ensure that the special needs of the disadvantaged are met? If young people pay rent, should their poor neighbors still live completely for free? How can we increase turnover and lower welfare dependency (which is to say a certain number of residents may prefer to not find jobs so that they can keep their qualifications for residence)?

The Social Housing Advocacy Consortium, which is at the vanguard of the call for housing for the underprivileged, has suggested a number of ways these goals can be achieved. Spatially, the complex should have a daycare center for preschool children and another for the elderly, public facilities where people living in the complex can interact with each other, and a large amount of open outdoor space. Moreover, An­kang could bring in companies that specialize in providing vocational training and local employment to the disadvantaged, such as Sunny Kitchen.

SHAC agrees that the government should adhere to the principle of “the user pays,” but should come up with a set of standards for rent that are fair but affordable for poorer residents (for example, there could be an upper limit of 30% of disposable income). There should also be complementary programs in place to provide temporary housing, to an appropriate degree, to help people transition out of public housing.

Kao Wen-ting, chief engineer at the Tai­pei City Department of Urban Development, says that the city government will take the opinions of the social welfare community into account during the planning stages, and will incorporate facilities as well as supporting measures that meet the needs of disadvantaged households.

If everyone pulls together and works hard, then An­kang will be reborn as a warm community shared between disadvantaged households and young people, and will serve as a new model for the promotion of social housing in Taiwan.