Media Statement by Yeo Bee Yin, State Assemblywoman for
Damansara Utama on Sunday 30 October 2016 in Petaling Jaya.
Noh Omar should pay
more attention in fulfillng Barisan Nasional’s election promise of building 500,000
PR1MA units by 2018.
Instead of blaming the
Selangor government, Urban Wellbeing, Housing and Local Government Minister
Tan Sri Noh Omar should give a more professional reply on the issue of affordable
housing in the parliament last Thursday.
In fact, Noh Omar should pay more attention in
fulfilling Barisan Nasional manifesto in 2013 on affordable housing, which was “building
1,000,000 affordable homes - driven by public & private sectors - including
500,000 PR1MA houses.[i]” The
recently announced Federal Budget 2017 shows that the cumulative total of PR1MA
units built by the end of 2015 was only 10,291. For 2016, the cumulative total
of PR1MA units approved were estimated at 145,000 with 60,000 expected to be
completed by end of this year (see below the part ).
Compiling from the information obtained from PR1MA
website[ii],
the total number of completed, planned and balloted PR1MA units is 56,591
units. Although the numbers of the website and budget differ slightly, one
thing certain is that it is still far from 500,000 PR1MA units as per the
manifesto. How is Barisan Nasional government going to fulfill this promise?
In addition to providing affordable housing directly, federal
policy such as financing of properties also affect their prices greatly. I found
it scary that as a minister, Noh Omar actually proposed allowing the developers
to loan to homebuyers with interest rates as high as 12 to 18%! Helping
home-buyers to borrow more will not solve the problem of skyroketing housing
prices but will only burden homebuyers with a life time of heavy debts.
We also need to look into the mistmatch of supply and demand
in the housing industry. Only 37% of the
new property launches in 2016 are at the affordable segment between RM 250,000
to RM450,000. Comparatively, although only 20% of the population can afford
them, nearly half (49%) of the new launches are above RM500,000! According to
Khazanah report “Making Housing Affordable”, developers do not respond quickly to
housing demand due to long construction period. This in turn is due to
fragmented industry structure of traditional general contracting process and
the lack of incentive for innovations among the developers. Such market
inefficiencies drive the prices up.
All in all, affordable housing issue is a complicated one, if
Noh Omar is really sincere, he should sit down with the Selangor
government to coordinate housing policies at the federal and state levels to
ensure that together we can create macro-environment that drive innovation and
efficiency in the housing industry and subsequently provide sufficient affordable
housing to the people of Selangor and Malaysia.
