During his time in office, Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama was heavily criticized in some corners for his evictions of people accused of living and building homes illegally on government land, especially near the capital’s rivers. Ahok defended the policy in part with his administration’s emphasis on building new rusunawa (low-cost apartments) given to house those who had been evicted.
Ahok’s administration had initiated long-term plans to build many more rusunawa to house the capital’s neediest families (his goal was to build 50,000 units by the end of 2017), but many of those plans have been cancelled now under the administration of current Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan.
At a budget meeting on Tuesday, the Jakarta Public Housing and Settlement Agency announced that it had dropped plans to build the eight rusunawa towers that had already been allocated IDR 1.3 trillion (US$90 million) in the 2018 Jakarta budget.
Meli Budiastuti, the head of the Jakarta Public Housing and Settlement Agency, said the projects were dropped due to a lack of progress on the construction and their inability to get the building completed before the end of the year.
Meli later clarified her statement by explaining that the budget had been restricted due to the change in administrations.
“It was earmarked as a single year project because there was a period of administrative turnover, so it was not allowed to be classified a multi-year project. It should have multi- year construction project based on the governor’s decree. However, because there was a change of governor, it was not allowed to be single year ,” Meli said yesterday as quoted by Detik.
Due to the cancelled projects, Meli said that there would be no new rusunawa constructed in Jakarta this year, but that they would push for more to be included in next year’s Jakarta budget.
She said the unused construction money from this year’s budget would be reabsorbed and used primarily for the her agency’s land acquisition projects.
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