By Goh Ban Lee.

PENANG state executive councillor in charge of housing Wong Hon Wai announced last week that developers who could not or chose not to build low-cost (LC) or low-medium-cost (LMC) houses would be required to pay premiums of RM30,000 for each LMC unit and RM40,000 for each LC unit they were supposed to build.

Predictably, Datuk Jerry Chan, chairman of the Penang branch of Real Estate and Housing Developers Association (Rehda), responded by saying that this would lead to increases in property prices and push the developers to concentrate on high-end houses.

Until the early 1990s, Balik Pulau, a place famous for durians, assam laksa and charming village houses nestled among fruit trees, was to be preserved as the food and fruit basket of Penang. Housing projects were discouraged.

By Himanshu Bhatt.

IT IS said that people living on an island tend to possess a distinct and highly parochial identity of their own, shaped by a subtle sense of how they are geo-graphically removed from the rest of the world. One may notice this trait, which can be forgiven for veering towards the vain, when interacting with native islanders in the region such as those from Penang, Bali, Phuket and even Langkawi.

In this regard, the inhabitants of Balik Pulau, a secluded district on the south-western side of Penang island, have reason to be even more cloistered and smug about their identity. Separated from the rest of civilisation by a huge range of green hills, the sprawling area opens up to the visitor a very different side of Penang – rural, lush, idyllic and dotted by villages, fruit farms, forests and agricultural estates, where durians, clove and nutmeg are said to grow as nowhere else on the planet.