By KINIBIZ
Issue 017 of KINIBIZ Magazine hits the stands today with its lead story on fixing the housing mess in this country.
Our cover story this week is a very weighty one, and appropriate too for what is a very weighty issue which threatens to tear the very social fabric of the country. And that’s not an exaggeration.
Those of you who are as old as I am might remember how it was possible to buy a bungalow in PJ – that is Petaling Jaya, arguably Selangor’s most upmarket suburb made into a city by a former chief minister who now languishes in jail – for under RM20,000 in the ’60s. A clerk who retired back then could use his Employees Provident Fund money to buy one, and many did.
Or look at glitzy (perhaps not so glitzy now given City Hall’s increasingly poor maintenance), rich Damansara Heights in Kuala Lumpur. Take a drive around there and you can pick out the houses with the ordinary compounds and lack of expensive renovations. If you are wondering why, it is probably because they were purchased by mid-level civil servants at a time when they could afford to do so back in the ’60s and ’70s.
Well, if you are a clerk now or a mid-level civil servant, forget about being able to afford landed property in PJ or Damansara Heights – you won’t even be able to afford a condominium in these areas and no one builds low-cost or even “affordable” homes here any more.
In fact, almost all classes of Malaysians, barring the super rich, cannot even afford homes without help from their family or the government. We are seeing the rise of a homeless generation. But sadly, nothing of note has been done for decades to sort this out. Read our cover story to understand the issues and some solutions we are suggesting – but we need political will. Don’t we always?
Elsewhere, 1Malaysia Development Bhd or 1MDB, our sad excuse for a strategic development company, is again in the news over its solar power project and links to DuSable, which in turn is linked to an Obama fundraiser. My Question Time column looks at the deal and concludes, with the facts listed, why it is yet another move to siphon money out of 1MDB. Sigh!
Two issues back we had a cover story on project delivery partners (PDPs) and how this seems to be a new gravy train for patronage and quick profits. One of those projects under a PDP is the multi-billion ringgit Pan Borneo Highway. But already the rumble is about a grumble that too little has been allocated to it. Really? Check out our TigerTalk on this as one of our resident cats dissects the issue for you as only a feline can.
Elsewhere, we deal with some heavy issues too. Our special feature story talks about how our country is being built with foreign labour and how they are getting a raw deal in the process. We take a look at strange government decisions about vaping and the like.
Don’t overlook our investing section – it may be more sedate but it brings you some real ideas about where you might want to put your money in the stock market. And as usual our enterprise section offers a bright spark as we recount how some people made it in the world of start-ups.
KINIBIZ Magazine can be bought at the stands for just RM15. A combined subscription to both KINIBIZ online and KINIBIZ Magazine is just RM318 per year. In order to subscribe, all you need to do is click here.
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