HOUSING AND FOOD SECURITY


Taiwan has some hard problems to solve as a nation. I think the most solvable are food security, housing, and energy.

Taiwan's Hard Problems

Hard Problem Primary Driver Trade-Offs
Super-Aged Society 20% of population is 65+ High tax burden on youth vs. potential collapse of healthcare, pensions, etc
Labor Shortage Continuous birth rate decline Mass immigration vs. social friction and wage stagnation.
Energy Security 97% fuel import reliance Eliminating nuclear vs. high risk of grid failure.
Water Scarcity Climate change / Fabs Prioritizing TSMC vs. survival of domestic agriculture.
Food Security Low self-sufficiency (30.3%) Cheap imports vs. local supply during a crisis/blockade.
Econ. Diversity "Dutch Disease" (Chip focus) Funneling talent into AI/Chips vs. letting other sectors wither.
Housing Crisis Low wages / High land cost Property as an investment vs. affordability for families.

Food Security

I believe Taiwan will follow Japan's trajectory, where rural areas will experience slow decline while city centers remain relatively stable. Given the average Taiwanese person's urban existence, there is an opportunity for roof space to be utilized much more effectively for not only solar energy, but small scale farming which translates into food security. There are about 800,000 walkups within the Taipei and New Taipei city area.

Conservatively:

Providing tax credits/incentives for an agreed-upon infrastructure install could be a great way to incentivize small-scale farming, just as with solar. The installations should be typhoon-proof, low-cost, able to grow a variety of leafy and micro greens, and accessible for noobs. I think there is gamification style incentive multipliers to be tried here for verifiable yields using edge computing sensors or cameras. This is basically iterating on normal security camera systems for volunteered roof spaces and community gardens. Items can be purchased from a simple Shopee or PCHome storefront and distributed via established trash truck routes.

Roofs are all different, so some kind of AI-assisted application based on a photo of each building's roof could be used to plan suitable buildouts. The problem is, unless the effort required is extremely minimal to grow anything, most city dwellers will never make plant keeping a part of their daily life. There might be a solution that is attractive to the layperson in the form of a fancy new multipurpose smart home device like a gas and power meters + hydroponic tower + house battery system, but this would need to find success as a smart home "all in one" appliance or system first, and then get potential subsidies later. A town in the south has already had success with battery systems.

There is even an opportunity to run civic battery recycling centers to build DIY powerwalls. There are a ton of personal electronics and car batteries that could be repurposed effectively here, while creating blue collar jobs.

Another avenue of success could be more community-driven intrinsic incentives. (The pride of helping those around you and the country.) Then there are the extrinsic incentives (money): like high-yield bonds, tax breaks, or bounties on verifiable production quotas. There are plenty of boomers and people with time within an entire neighborhood who would gladly grab a $500-3000 NTD a month for being the "captain" of their community garden, or become a trusted caretaker for a handful of rooftops. Out of the typical five floors in a normal Taipei walkup, only one person would need to schedule an hour or so each day a week in a rotation. Caretakers could submit photos with metadata + location data of their rounds in order to receive incentives, and people within the same building could win whistleblower awards to keep the others from cheating.

One could take a page from crypto infrastructure with slashingSlashing is a penalty where a validator loses a portion of their staked tokens for breaking network rules or being offline. It ensures validators have "skin in the game" to keep the blockchain secure and honest.. For example, if your IoT node goes offline for more than 24 hours without taking an image of your garden during a time frame, you lose your incentives or your bond for that month/tax season.

If there was a doubling from current figures of rooftop solar and micro farming in the conservative rooftop surface area estimates (25% of that rooftop space is usable -> 31 km2, 10% usable -> 12.5 km2), there could be the following outcomes:

Domain Impact
CO2 reduction 300k - 840k tons/year
Power generation 4-10% of city electricity
Peak power shaving 300-900 MW
Urban cooling 0.3 - 1.2 C
Flood mitigation 1.8 - 7.5M m3 stormwater buffered
Food supply 4 - 25% of vegetables
Disaster food buffer Feed 0.5-2M people/day
Food price volatility -5% to -15%

How could we achieve this?

I believe Singapore is a good case study to learn from, and see how to not fail or improve on food security policies at a city level. I think tech based solutions, and an improved community + civic led approach could bring Taiwan closer to a long list of net societal positives.

Housing

Taiwan has extremely mature capital and housing markets. The government already knows it has a hard problem when it comes to housing; enforcement is the real issue. Despite being a pretty small island, Taiwan does not actually have a pure housing shortage. Like many markets, it is largely a misallocation problem because housing has been converted from shelter into a speculative asset. But if we believe basic shelter should be accessible on a minimum wage, then the state has to guarantee a floor, not just manage the market. As of early 2026, transaction volumes are down 30% thanks to credit controls, but prices in Taipei are still sitting around a 15x price-to-income ratio. It is the ghost storefront phenomenon on a national scale: landlords would rather leave a place empty for years than lower the price because increased valuations will yield more than any lost rent. Even with the House Hoarding Tax 2.0 now in full effect, speculators just treat the 4.8% rate as a "cost of doing business" because the tax is based on artificially low government valuations, not real market prices. Combined with the ease of accessing the US risk-free rate, which is currently 3.5% to 3.9%, and a heavily manipulated New Taiwan dollar, capital has little reason to move into productive risk.

Landlords in Taiwan enjoy a pretty sweet deal. Most operate in a shadow market where they skip out on taxes, can block local tenants from registering their HukouHukou is a household registration system that ties residents to a specific address. Landlords often block tenants from registering to avoid higher property tax assessments. to keep their own property taxes low, and treat the security deposit as a hostage. The government's "Public Welfare Landlord" subsidies are a carrot that most landlords are not interested in; landlords fear that registering today triggers a decade of back-tax audits. We need a one-time amnesty program for those who go legit now, paired with a stronger stick for those who stay in the dark. There is no love lost for these shadow landlords either, especially given the lack of real penalties for discriminating against foreigners, the elderly, or pets.

The government's recent move to reserve 20% of social housing for young families is a start, but it is a drop in the bucket if 90% of the rental market stays underground. Much of this social housing is just "leased-and-managed" (包租代管), basically a government-funded band-aid that doesn't create permanent public assets. If housing is going to be treated as a basic right, then Taiwan needs to build at scale. We need high-density public housing near MRT lines, on the edge of major cities, built fast and in volume. Clean, safe, and permanently affordable. While the government should be applauded for slowly moving in the right direction, without a serious expansion of supply, political frustration will grow. As we saw with the Sunflower Movement, young people will not stay quiet forever when they are priced out of their own future by a K-shaped recovery.

A progressive vacancy tax verified by tech via water and electricity data is something I still want to see tried. The goal, however, should not be to fine everyone into oblivion, but to push empty units back into circulation while we build new stock. Speculators might try to fake it with IoT devices to cycle the lights, but verification tactics can be improved. Furthermore, rental transparency must be mandatory. If a landlord is not on the unified registration platform, they should lose access to legal protections in disputes. Moderate but real enforcement creates a functioning rental market; it shouldn't collapse it.

In my opinion, the Taiwanese government should treat extreme abuse seriously, but focus less on punishment for its own sake and more on outcomes. While aggressively fining total assets might sound satisfying, it risks freezing development and shrinking supply. We do not need more broad subsidies that just get swallowed by higher rents; we need a state that treats the right to shelter as more important than the right to high returns. We need the state to directly build enough housing so that a person working full-time on minimum wage can always afford a basic place to live. Homeownership may be out of reach for the average person in Taipei for the foreseeable future. That reality does not mean shelter itself should be out of reach. Guarantee the floor. Let the market compete above it.