AUGUST 20 — A tale of two realities in one city.

In Kuala Lumpur’s Golden Triangle, gleaming towers rise, and million-ringgit condominiums stand like monuments to prosperity. Life here unfolds in modern air-conditioned comfort.

Barely a kilometre away, in the concrete and dilapidated blocks of Perumahan Awam Hang Tuah, Mak Cik Siti sits at her kitchen table, counting ringgit notes and wondering if this month’s RM124 rent will leave enough for her child’s university expenditure.

The collision of these two realities, prosperity and precarity, has the potential to redefine Malaysia’s urban landscape.

Malaysia’s proposed Urban Renewal Act (URA) would speed up the redevelopment of ageing urban housing by replacing unanimity with supermajority consent. 

Critics worry that it could price out low-income families, while experts argue it’s necessary to fix unsafe blocks and revive the city.

For residents like Mak Cik Siti, the stakes are whether they can return and still afford to live in the city. 

Without clear affordability safeguards and a guaranteed right to return, the process of renewal risks turning into removal, which calls attention to the need for protections that would ensure fairness.

The arithmetic of housing stress: Can Mak Cik Siti and her family afford to return?

On paper, the URA looks sensible: a pragmatic way to rejuvenate ageing blocks while offering residents newer, safer homes. Yet behind that technical change lies a deeper impact. 

Consider Mak Cik Siti’s arithmetic. Her husband earns RM2,800 as a security guard; she adds RM500 from part-time work. 

Thanks to a public housing subsidy, their RM124 rent is about 4 per cent of income, leaving room for groceries, schoolbooks and a small buffer. 

But if her estate is rebuilt as strata, will that affordability hold?

Renewal typically brings lifts and higher-spec systems. These improve safety and access, but they also add recurring charges, maintenance fees and a sinking fund that bite far more into a B40 budget than brochure gloss suggests. 

Officials often cite the Razak Mansion as a “success model”, despite differing consent mechanics. The trade-off matters: after the upgrade, maintenance cost reportedly rose by about 240 per cent, from around RM35 to roughly RM120, with new sinking-fund obligations added. 

The common international yardstick is the 30 per cent housing-cost-to-income rule. On that measure, some post-renewal offers may seem acceptable at first glance for the likes of Mak Cik Siti’s household. 

However, for low-income families in a high-cost city who have already spent roughly one-third of their income on daily necessities, affordability is determined by what remains after essentials. 

When buffers are slim, any increase in fees or dip in income can erase them quickly, especially in today’s climate of economic uncertainty and job market volatility.

Ageing adds another stressor. Mak Citi Siti and her husband may not be able to sustain the same work hours within the next decade. 

Malaysia is moving towards an ageing society, with the share of citizens aged 65 and above projected to rise markedly by 2040; households at the intersection of poverty and precarity will feel the squeeze first and hardest. Without a solid social-protection floor, the risk compounds over time.

For Mak Cik Siti’s family, higher housing costs would not just trim their future savings; they would force trade-offs between a child’s education, medical bills and groceries. 

Without clear guardrails, the promised “right to return” (and, in practice, the right to remain) risks becoming a privilege – reserved for those with savings rather than a protection for those most vulnerable, like Mak Cik Siti’s household.

Ethnic fault lines in the city

Like many of us, Mak Cik Siti and her husband use social media to stay informed about current affairs. Their TikTok algorithm regularly pushes short videos from a well-known political influencer, who claims that the URA is a “cara halus halau orang Melayu” out of urban areas, as they would be unable to buy back their homes due to rising costs.

Political opportunism is common among politicians, but economic reality can make their claims feel existential — especially in ethnically segregated urban enclaves where inequality is visible and entrenched.

Mak Cik Siti’s and her husband’s parents may have been part of the first wave of rural-to-urban migrants under the NEP in the 1970s, encouraged to seek better prospects in the city. 

From 1980 to 2000, the Bumiputera population of Kuala Lumpur grew by 77 per cent to 541,081 people — rising from a share of 33 per cent of the city’s population in 1980, to 38 per cent in 2000. 

Most were able to be housed in the blocks of public housing dotting the city. However, decades on, many in this cohort still face precarious urban livelihoods. 

While Malay participation in urban labour markets has expanded, gains in quality of life have not kept pace; many households remain at the margins, literally and figuratively.

The recent Kuala Lumpur Structure Plan 2040 (KLSP 2040) continues the traditional approach of establishing a demographic composition target that ensures the Bumiputera population remains at no less than 40 per cent in the city. Separately, the Local Plan (PTKL2040) targets 40 per cent of all new homes by 2040 to be affordable units.

But targets on paper mean little unless a returning household like Mak Cik Siti’s can meet the monthly cash flow that could secure their household safety net and improve their quality of life. 

In other words, counting heads and units can crowd out the harder task – making urban living genuinely liveable by protecting housing budgets.

With the current ethnic compositions not necessarily entering the same neighbourhoods, a spatial line of inequality and precarity emerges between ethnic groups, worsening and deepening existing segregation.

This pattern has become an “anxiety machine”: the perception of “Chinese dominance” in urban space is paired with real disparities in income, tenure security, and everyday liveability. 

If the URA’s redevelopment process repeats this pattern – without explicit protections for household resilience – it could create a geography of inequality and map out lines of resentment in the city.

Whether Mak Cik Siti herself perceives the URA as a threat that could disrupt the delicate balance of ethnicity in our country will depend on its implementation: will affordability safeguards be effective, and will livelihoods be protected?

A better renewal is possible (and necessary)

To be fair, the URA seeks to fix real problems: ageing stock, unsafe structures, and dysfunctional strata management. No one, regardless of income or ethnicity, should have to live in conditions that harm their well-being. 

But if renewal is to integrate and improve the lives of poor people rather than inadvertently undermine them, we must look beyond the mere physical refresh to strategic investments in social liveability, tenure security, and social mixing – not profitability at the expense of people.

If renewal is judged by the glittering sheen of a new lobby, the URA passes. If it is judged by whether Mak Cik Siti can still live in the new unit with peace of mind, the draft needs critical scrutiny.

Policymakers should look beyond bricks and facades and stay grounded in lived realities. Counts of skyscrapers or headline ethnic shares are just statistics; without reference to everyday life, they mean little. 

What ultimately matters in the city is residents’ well-being, social cohesion, and solidarity in the city.

The URA can prove the sceptics wrong only if Parliament rewrites it as a Right-to-City Act – a law that treats liveability as a social right, renewal as a public task, and diversity as a design brief.

Otherwise, “urban renewal” will read as “urban removal” to those who can least afford to move.

* Muhammad Hafiz Hassim is an urban sociologist interested in issues of participatory urban regeneration, inclusive governance, and social justice. He is a contributor to Think City’s Kita Untuk Kita (K2K Programme) (www.kitak2k.com), a community empowerment programme focused on the urban poor in public housing.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.