HOUSING AND FOOD SECURITY

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

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:

• 25% of that rooftop space is usable -> 31 km2
• 10% usable -> 12.5 km2

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. We should have an incentive multiplier for verifiable yields using edge computing sensors or cameras - iterating on security camera systems for volunteered roof spaces and community gardens. Items can be purchased from a government web portal 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 it 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 mini-fridge + hydroponic tower + house battery, but this would need to find success as a home appliance first, and then get potential subsidies later.

Another avenue of success could be more community-driven intrinsic incentives - the "pride" of helping those around you. Then there are the extrinsic incentives ($): 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 few thousand NT a month for being the "captain" of their community garden, or become a trusted caretaker for a handful of rooftops. Out of five floors in a 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 honest.

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. in real life". For example, if your IoT node goes offline for more than x hours without taking an image of your garden during a time frame, you lose your incentives or your bond for that month/tax season.

I asked GPT to calculate the impact. If there was a doubling from current figures of rooftop solar and micro farming in our 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?

• Tax credits: 20-40% installation credit for rooftop solar + food + green + rainwater systems (modeled on solar subsidies).
• Fee rebates: Stormwater, flood, sewage, and insurance premium reductions for certified buildings.
• Zoning bonuses: FAR + height + density incentives for compliant developments.
• Public mandates: Required deployment on schools, hospitals, public housing, parking structures.
• Private levers: Plug-and-play hardware, turnkey building installs, power + food offtake guarantees, insurance-backed performance warranties.

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 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. Taiwan does not actually have a housing shortage; we have a massive misallocation problem because housing has been converted from shelter into a speculative high-yield asset. As of early 2026, transaction volumes are down 30% thanks to credit controls, but prices in Taipei are still sitting at 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. 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.

Landlords here enjoy a pretty sweet deal. Most operate in a shadow market where they skip out on taxes, block 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 toothless carrot; landlords fear that registering today triggers a decade of back-tax audits. We need a one-time Tax Amnesty for those who go legit now, paired with the "nuclear option" for those who stay in the dark. Currently, there is no real penalty 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) - a government-funded band-aid that does not create permanent public assets. We need the political will to "de-speculate." My friend thinks this will not happen and posits that the ruling class will just opt to relax immigration for wealthy groups from Singapore or China to keep the bubble inflated. I agree with that take until there is an actual uprising. 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.

We need a progressive vacancy tax verified by water and electricity data. Speculators might try to fake it with IoT devices to cycle the lights, but we can use the same detective-style tactics used to catch marijuana growers to verify real occupancy. Secondly, rental transparency must be mandatory. If a landlord is not on the unified registration platform, they should lose their access to legal protections in disputes.

The Taiwan government should prosecute speculators the same way the EU goes after Big Tech. In the same way the rich are not scared of flat-rate speeding tickets, they are not scared of minor tax hikes. They are, however, scared of percentage-based fines on total assets. We need to legislate and fine them into oblivion unless they rein in this grossly anti-consumerist behavior. We do not need more "subsidies" that eventually get swallowed by higher rents; we need a state that treats the right to shelter as more important than the right to a 10% annual ROI.