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发表于 2011-9-10 13:49:04
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VOX POPULI: Cheap housing doesn't cut it when so many are still displaced.2011/09/10
People are still living in 40,000 temporary houses, unable to plan their future. About 20,000 are also staying with relatives and 10,000 are in hotels and ryokan. The rest are still stuck at evacuation centers. Six months have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake struck. The sheer number of people living in temporary accommodation symbolizes shattered life plans.
The catastrophe not only shook survivors' beliefs about life, but also those of many others. Companies were forced to restructure.
March 11 has divided the Heisei Era into pre-disaster and post-disaster periods. But some things have jumped across the divide, so to speak, as if nothing has changed.One example is a housing construction project for government officials in Asaka, Saitama Prefecture.
The project calls for 850 housing units in two 13-storey buildings to be built on the former site of a U.S. military base. The units will be offered to central government bureaucrats who work in the Saitama Shintoshin (Saitama New Urban Center). The total cost of the project tops 10 billion yen ($129 million).
The project was frozen two years ago in the government's budget screening process, but was thawed later for inclusion in the fiscal 2011 budget. Construction has already begun. Why the government didn't rethink this matter after the historic catastrophe is beyond me.
The finance minister who approved the project late last year was none other than Yoshihiko Noda, dubbed as the "loach" prime minister. He expects us, the people, to accept post-disaster reconstruction tax increases because of our country's dire financial straits. But Noda would certainly not be setting a good example for the taxpaying public if he goes ahead and spends their tax money to provide cheap housing "of the government officials, by the government officials, for the government officials."
The regime change made us hope that wasteful public works projects would be scrapped. But the new administration's much-touted budget-screening process has let us down.
The government says the cost of the Asaka project can be offset by selling old houses for civil servants. But the point is, is it really necessary to build housing for government employees at a time when major corporations are unloading housing for their workers?
The argument may be made that living in comfortable homes will help enhance the performance of civil servants. But this holds only in "normal" times. The government's toughest "earthquake-proof" homes, impervious to even this national crisis, are seeing their steel frameworks rise to the "background music" of tax increase debates. They are due for completion in two years. I, for one, couldn't possibly imagine settling in comfortably there.
--The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 9 |
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