Responding to these problems, the ITB School of Planning and Policy Development Architecture (SAPPK) held a webinar with the theme "Housing Affordability: Finding a Bridge Between Policy and Reality" on Thursday (9/12) via Zoom Meeting. This webinar is included in the seventh SAPPK webinar series, which now features speakers from the SAPPK ITB Housing and Settlement Research Group.

As one of the speakers, M. Jehansyah Siregar, Ph.D., stated that the public housing program can solve housing problems in Indonesia. This discussion was titled "Challenges of Public Housing Program Implementation in Indonesia: Lessons from Singapore and Japan".

Public housing is a practice of direct intervention from the government in providing housing that has been carried out well in many countries in Asia. In Indonesia, the public housing program is not yet available. The government provides many social and commercial housing programs, such as Rusunawa, close to the public housing program, but unfortunately have not developed well.

So far, the program for providing simple subsidized landed houses has become increasingly expensive, unaffordable, and farther away from the city center. The larger Jakarta metropolitan area causes subsidized housing to be further away from the city center. This is a paradox considering the high demand for housing is located in the city center. The discontinuity between demand and supply impacts the growth of slum areas in the city center.

Therefore, special attention is needed to overcome the problem of housing affordability for the community. Housing affordability is the ability to reach housing, either in ownership of a house or apartment or rental of a house or apartment. This problem needs to be overcome by an adequate public housing policy.

Public housing as a form of public housing policy is the answer to the problem of urbanization and urban housing problems, especially in Singapore and Japan. The Singapore government provides public housing built by the HDB (Housing Development Board) with high apartment types and minimum standards to reach 80% of the population. The government subsidizes this public housing, but there are strict control mechanisms to avoid mistargeting, development in poor locations, and poor management.

SCAPPE (Singapore Center for Applied and Policy Economics) research in 2016 shows that the affordability ratio of public housing in Singapore shows a small number, which is below 0.3. This is the opposite of the affordability ratio of private housing, which is more than 0.3.

"Singapore used to be the same as Jakarta, there were still many slums. However, with the development of the progressive public housing program, it is now a city without slums," he said.

Thus, affordable housing is no longer a problem for Singapore as public housing plays a vital role in realizing a modern and prosperous society and sustainable urban development. Public housing in Singapore has also turned out to be an instrument for building national character. The public housing program builds physical housing and builds the social character of the community.

"Public housing in Indonesia cannot be postponed any longer and must be implemented consistently. Rapid urbanization and the growth of new metropolitan cities have the potential to repeat the failure to manage urbanization by its predecessor cities, such as Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung and Medan," said M. Jehansyah at the end of his presentation.

Reporter: Achmad Lutfi Harjanto (Regional and City Planning, 2020)
Translator: Billy AP*