| Summary: | 碩士 === 長榮大學 === 土地管理與開發學系碩士班 === 100 === As both domestic and international economies continue to be in recession, lower social class increases year by year. This urges governments to focus more on the development of social welfare policies. Housing Act is one of the policies included in social welfare where it aims to protect citizens to be entitled to appropriate and affordable housing. This act ensures housing justice where even members of the lower social class would receive fair basic living rights. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether or not existing residential welfare measures meet the needs of low-income families.
This study used in-depth interviews with purposeful sampling of twenty low-income households in Kaohsiung. Current conditions of residence and usages of residential welfare of low-income families were assessed in terms of the current status of residential consumer spending, social assistance, housing quality, and housing subsidies. The results show that in terms of housing affordability, due to both the economic downturn and high unemployment rate, the employment opportunity and income of lower social class are relatively reduced. With the new system of social assistance modifies the population range of families to be supported, the living allowance, which low-income families rely on, is reduced as well. With increasing housing consumption cost, the other aspects of normal living expenses are relatively restricted causing housing burden to increase. In terms of housing quality, because lower-income families with multiple vulnerabilities have limited incomes; thus, the choice of living environments is restricted. With the current state of serious shortage of existing public rental housings, lower-income families do not have choices regarding to appropriate living spaces. This further worsens the low living quality of lower social class. In terms of housing subsidies, although both the central and local governments introduce a number of subsidy programs actively, but it is still an indisputable fact that the rates of application and approval of low-income family housing subsidies are still low. This study also discovered that low-income households are often being excluded from subsidies due to insufficient information regarding to application requirements and others. Altogether, these findings indicate that the governments still have room for improvements in executing housing subsidy policy. Hopefully, this study could push relevant government units to ponder more on residential welfare policy implementation.
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