Housing in Indonesia is unaffordable, according to finance Minister Sri Mulyani
Indrawati. Prices are so prohibitive that only the richest 20 percent of
households can afford to buy a house in the formal market. The bottom 40
percent cannot access the formal housing market at all. The middle 40 percent
can only do so through goverment subsidies.
Jakarta residents are not only deprived of affordable housing but also of green
spaces. The latter make up less than 10 percent of the capital city’s land area,
depressingly short of the 30% mandated by the 2007 spatial planing Law. The
consequences are dire : water catchment areas to prevent flooding are
insufficient ; trees to produce oxygen are scarce ; free and healthy recreation
areas are inadequate.
What hampers the provision of housing and green spaces is land shortage.
Jakarta is among the world’s densest cities, on par with tokyo with about
14000 residents per square kilometer. The diffrence is how they are built.
Jakarta’s density is sprawling horizontally with low- rise single-family houses.
Such development swallows excessive land area and leaves little space foe
affordable housing and parks. For this reason, jakarta needs to build upwards.
The advent of the mass transit system in jakarta could make the capital’s land
utilization significantly more efficient and housing more affordable. Agrarian
and spatial planning ministerial regulation No. 16/2017 promotes transit –
oriented developments (TOD) through densification around transit nodes.
Thus, jakarta is to create more floor space around MRT, light rail transit (LRT),
bus rapid transit (BRT) and commuter train stations by building vertically.
This entails desaigning compact, mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhoods
that are well-integrated with mass transit options while allowing open, green
areas. While TOD’s are theoretically attractive, their implementation in jakarta
is challenging because of two key issues : lack of vision in jakarta’s master plan
and the high cost of land.
Jakarta’s 2030 master plan, published in 2014, is devoid of a spatial vision and
offers projections on its population and economic growth that are too
conservative. It assumed a population increase of merely 20 percent (from 10
to 12 million) between 2014 and 2030.
While it is true that jakarta’s population only expanded by 20 percent (from 8.4
to 10 million) between 2000 and 2014, its economy grew astonishingly by 187
percent in real terms in the same period.
Indeed, most of the economy is still based in jakarta, but the bulk of the
population expansion happened in the suburbs: tanggerang, bekasi, bogor ,
depok , etc.
Clearly, jakarta cannot continue to rely on its suburbs to accommodate its
population in low – density housing. We are already experiencing the drudgery
of long commutes, not to mention the further loss of water catchment areas
and fertile agricultural land.
The first step toward better planning is to acknowledge that population growth
is inevitable and to support it jakarta needs to build upwards.
Adopting TOD principles as mandated by the 2017 ministerial regulation
requires an update in jakarta’s master plan. The plan, due to be updated in
2019, needs to allow more space for housing, particularly the affordable kind.
This means allowing densification and vertical development around transit
hubs while simultaneously enabling space to be used for much needed green
areas.
The second issue stems from the high cost of land. Previous non-subsidized
attempts to get developers to build affordable housing as part of their social
obligations have been ineffective. Those vertical houses ended up in far – flung
areas, such as marunda and rorotan in north jakarta. Where land is affordable,
but these locations are undesirable for low income household who earn the
minimum wage as they need easy access to the city,s economy and job
markets. Business and other segments of the population too require the
services of cleaners, drivers , etc. To maintain daily operations.
Because of the high cost of land, providing affordable housing in TODs requires
public subsidies in the form of land in strategic areas. Otherwise, affordable
housing will always be built in unattractive, inaccessible locations.
An innovative way to address the issue is to engage state – or provincial –
goverment-owned enterprises as part of the solution.
The own vast amounts of land in strategic areas, yet such land has low floor
area utilization for its use is limited to a single service (i.e. a market or a bus
terminal). Take one – to two floor traditional markets for example. What if we
build multistory low income apartments on top of them?
This could
Afford = mampu
Advent = kedatangan
Bulk = jumlah besar
Depressingly = menyedihkan
Deprived = dirampas
Dire = mengerikan
densest cities = kota terpadat
devoid = tanpa
excessive = berlebihan
Household = Rumah tangga
hampers = menghambat
Insufficient = tidak cukup
Inadequate = tidak memadai
Mandated = diamanatkan
Prohibitive = terlalu tinggi
provision = penyediaan
Scarce = langka
spatial planing Law = UU perencanaan tata ruang
shortage = kekurangan
sprawling = luas
swallows = mengalami
Unaffordable = tidak terjangkau