BANDUNG, KOMPAS.com -  People’s Housing Minister Suharso Monoarfa said the government’s target was to make about 30 percent of Indonesian cities free from slums by 2019. "The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) of the world in 2020 include improvement of slums," the minister said at the Bandung-based Institute of Technology (ITB) here on Saturday.
     
He said at present Indonesia had 8 million homeless families or families who had no proper health care and housing. With the assumption of building 500,000 units of houses for them per annum it would take 16 years to provide the poor families with modest houses, he said.
     
The minister said that the government would need 16 years to get rid of slums areas and provide homeless families with proper and modest shelters. However, he said, the assumption had not yet taken into account the growth of the country’s population.
     
If the population growth is taken into account, the government would need to build 1,674 units of house per annum for a period of 20 years, the minister said. He said that in other countries like the United States and Japan, housing industry or resettlement development was one of the factors which boost economic growth.