Logo image
Distance matters: Social housing for the poor
Magazine article

Distance matters: Social housing for the poor

I. D. Wilson and A. Savirani
Inside Indonesia
28/04/2018
url
https://www.insideindonesia.org/distance-matters-social-housing-for-the-poorView

Abstract

Sri grimaced with pain as she hauled the five-gallon containers off her makeshift trolley. For the past year she’s scraped together a living delivering drinking water up and down the stairs in her five storey rusunawa (social housing apartment block) where she lives with her family in Jakarta’s east. Tap water is not drinkable, and there is no lift in the apartment, so tenants are happy to pay her to do it. At 55 years old, it’s a far cry from the early retirement she had enjoyed renting out modest rooms in her old neighbourhood of Pasar Ikan. Despite living there for several decades, Sri and her family were labelled illegal squatters by former governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, as part of a wave of evictions to make way for public works and commercial developments. In April 2016 they, and hundreds of others, were evicted at such short notice there was little time to gather more than a handful of possessions before the bulldozers came in. Sri and her family had few options other than to accept the government’s offer of a social housing apartment over 30 kilometres away in Rawa Bebek...

Details

Metrics

70 Record Views
Logo image