S

uresh Bhagwandas Bhavnani, 50-year-old unit resident of the Graha Cempaka Mas (GCM) apartment complex in Central Jakarta, showed a wooden box stored in an office in the complex one evening.

'€œCould you guess the content of the box?'€ he asked The Jakarta Post. '€œThey are crowbars.'€

Suresh said he and other tenants of the apartment had kept a crowbar in their units for the last two years. '€œIt is used to open the padlock of the power houses if they are locked by the building management,'€ he said, referring to PT Duta Pertiwi.

The developer pressed a criminal charge on Suresh for damaging their property and he was brought to the police for questioning. Suresh, who is an official of the new P3SRS, was eventually released but two of his neighbors were named suspects. Suresh said the two won their pretrial motion.

Suresh, who has owned a unit since 1997, said the dispute started two years ago when some of the tenants objected to an increase in service charges. Critical tenants started digging up information about apartment management and they found out a regulation that stipulates tenants pay electricity bills to P3SRS and not to the building management like they had been doing for the past 17 years.

'€œMost of us knew nothing about our rights as tenants for the years we lived here. Now we started demanding them but the management could not accept it and criminalized us,'€ he said.

The vocal tenants, only dozens among the 1,049 in total, demanded the financial reports of the developer and when the company did not produce one, Suresh said, some tenants decided to form their own P3SRS, which is deemed illegal by the developer.

Compared to landed housing estates, life in high-rise properties involves different, more complicated rules because one big building is owned by several people, who have had only about 20 years to adapt to this different lifestyle.

Bills are also much higher compared to landed housing, thus an increasing number of middle class tenants, who have a tighter budget compared to the upper-class ones, have started complaining and have been involved in disputes with building management staff that mostly are affiliated with the developers.

The Jakarta administration data revealed in April that around 18 percent of 107 private apartment buildings across Jakarta had reported problems.

The United Action of Indonesia Apartment Owners and Tenants (KAPPRI) have presented different data, recording that tenants of at least 61 apartments had reported problems with their building managements and developers. The problems range from the reluctance of developers to give ownership certificates, unilateral increases of service charges, electricity, and water bills, the lack of financial transparency, commercialized public facilities and two versions of P3SRS, KAPPRI said.

Urban expert Suryono Herlambang of Tarumanagara University said that many owners eventually had to bear the losses from the disputes as the government failed to protect their citizens. '€œThe government is absent in this problem,'€ he said.

He said that the city administration or the government usually saw the dispute as an internal problem. '€œThey see tenants or owners of apartment units as customers, not citizens,'€ he said.

He said that the position of tenants who decided to fight for their rights became even weaker when the residents were not united. '€œMany apartment units were bought by investors who do not occupy the unit but rent them out. These kind of owners do not care about increasing electricity bills or service charges as they will be paid by the renter,'€ he said, adding that the investors also did not like the dispute as it would affect the value of the units.

He added that, meanwhile, the renters also did not feel the obligation to participate in the fight because when they could no longer afford the service charges, they could move to other places.

Property law expert Erwin Kallo said the problems were rooted in Law No. 20/2011 on apartments that were open to different interpretations. '€œIt has been four years since the law was passed but the government regulation [PP] that stipulates the details of how the law should be applied is not finished yet. So, the interpretation of the law is random,'€ he said.

Erwin gave an example of the definition of ownership of an apartment unit. '€œThe proof of ownership over the unit is the issuance of a SKBG [the building ownership certificate],'€ he said, adding that when the buyer did not have the certificate, he was technically not yet the owner but a future owner.

He said, therefore, they could not form a P3SRS as it was an association of owners or tenants authorized by the owners. Erwin also put the blame on groups that wanted to take advantage of the loopholes. They could be the residents or the developers, he said.

The Public Works and Housing Ministry'€™s director general of housing, Syarif Burhanuddin, said the PP for the law was almost finished.

'€œThere are four government regulations for the law and they are now in the signing process,'€ he said.

Syarif said he hoped that the regulations could become a tool to resolve the many problems about apartment and housings.