City Light, for 26-year-old me, and you.

People in my generation have always been said to be raised in the “golden ten years” of Taiwan. I remember when I was a child one documentary called “A wide world for next generation” came to interview me. For my generation, is it really a wider world? We were born in the 80s, the time when the disparity between the rich and the poor rose significantly with the economic growing in Taiwan. Some might say that’s why it has been called the golden ten years, but the economic growing didn’t promise a better life to everyone. Then we grew older and all gathered in Taipei for study, for job no matter where we’re from. But things happened within this 20 years have made it impossible to live in Taipei. To live in the city is not a dream, a hope anymore, but a delusion.

Since 1985, the year I was born, Taiwan’s stock market experienced a crazy bull market, the TAIEX index dashed from 636 to 12682, 20 times growing within five years. Looks like we are getting rich, but it was actually a warning sign. The extra income along with the Quantitative easing policy and strengthening NTD had encouraged people to invest in real estates. 1989, when I was four, a group of angry citizens found the “Organization of the House-less”. On 26^th of August, more than ten thousand people slept with the sky as their ceiling and ground as their bed on Zhong-xiao East Road, the most expensive area at the time. Soon in 1990 the bubble started to vanish, the real-estate market didn’t reflect the influence until 1997, and it never really came back to the reasonable price. Government never really faced the problem in housing policy; unfair taxing and injustice rules are rampant. In 1999, Premier Hsiao Wan-chang applied the bill of “150 billion for housing construction revitalizing”. When DDP became the party in power, they turned the cutting of land appreciation tax (LAT) from temporary to permanent. Recently, the housing price flies again with the slogan of “economy recovery” from government with a series of policies and related provisions (such as rewards for the renewal volume).

Professor Hua, Chang-I pointed out in his research of housing economics that the average annual income of Taipei citizens in 1990 was 0.72 million NTD while the average price of house was 6.3 million, which was supposed to be 1.5 million if the house market mechanism had functioned normally, no mention the price for the newly-built. In 2010 the average cost of buying a house (or rather, a flat) was 15 million and the average price of presale pieces was 0.74 million per acre according to the latest record of first quarter 2011. Last September the labor bank announced that the average first salary of newly-graduates was 25,766 NTD while the average rent in Da-an district reached 13,976. The pressure index of renting a house climbed to 54% (Hsin-yi District 53%, Song-shan district 51%, Hsih-lin District 50% and Chong-cheng District 49 %.) The housing and construction related businesses were given rights to boost the economy growing while the young people suffered a lot entering the society. For the 26s, no matter we came here to study or to work, we might go and forth for a part-time job, we might move to Taipei with our parents. To every one of us, to have a place in Taipei is such a tiny but difficult wish.

Nobody really pays attention to the working class, who are actually the base to stabilize the city and the strongest power to change the world. No matter what kind of difficult situations they have to face, they are always able to pull the whole society through, they play a critical role in defining a city’s success or failure. I named the project “City Light” and wish to follow the spirit of Carlie Choplin in presenting the normal people who struggled to survive in the modern society. I started from 3 26-year-old young men and their own experiences. And the stories will show us eventually how we are all twisted together as a whole.