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urchasing a house is becoming more difficult for the urban middle class as prices skyrocket and as the government’s housing program continues to focus mostly on low-income people.

For the past few years, Rahmalia Hidayani and her husband have struggled to find an affordable house for their small family in Greater Jakarta.

The 26-year-old freelancer and her civil servant husband earn a combined Rp 10 million (US$750) per month, more than three times the minimum wage in the capital city. Despite this, the available options in the market were still too expensive for them.

“We recently saw a 36 square meter [sqm] house sold at Rp 500 million, but the developer wanted us to make the full payment up front, instead of paying in installments,” she said.

In the East Java capital of Surabaya, the country’s second largest city, 33-year-old Herpin Dewanto has also faced similar hurdles.

With a monthly income of Rp 8 million, more than double the local minimum wage, the private employee said he found difficulties in buying a 36 sqm house in the neighboring city of Sidoarjo, where hundreds of thousands of people commute to Surabaya for work every day.

“The price for type-36 houses in strategic areas of Sidoarjo has now hit at least Rp 500 million apiece. With my pay grade, it’s just too expensive,” he said.

A recent national survey by the biggest housing market portal, Rumah123, show that nearly half of the 3,436 respondents currently have no house and live either with their parents or in a rented property.

Around a third of the respondents said they could not afford to buy the house they wanted to live in, while more than 40 percent said they would be able to purchase the house, but at the cost of not having any savings at all.

“There have been signs that more and more Indonesians consider not buying any property at all because it is getting too expensive,” Rumah123 country general manager Ignatius Untung said recently.

The government has repeatedly stated that Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, needs to tackle the housing backlog before it gets worse. The backlog currently stands at over 13.5 million units.

However, most of its programs have so far targeted low-income residents only, including the one million house program and government-backed mortgages (FLPP). The maximum price of houses for the low-income residents itself has been set at Rp 120 million.

It has inevitably put the local property market in a flat growth in recent years. Data from research firm Cushman and Wakefield Indonesia, for instance, suggest that the overall demand for houses rose slightly by 2 percent in the first half of 2016 from 1.3 percent in the corresponding period last year. Average sales, meanwhile, grew 3 percent annually in the first six months of 2016.

The firm’s research head Arief Rahardjo said in Greater Jakarta alone, the market for houses offered at below Rp 1 billion has become rare.

At that price, a household must earn around Rp 20 million per month to buy a house with a monthly installment scheme that lasts at least 20 years.

Lenders have put in some effort to address the concerns of affordability. State housing lender Bank Tabungan Negara (BTN), which controls the largest mortgage portfolio, said it would reduce the interest rate of the housing mortgage (KPR) to single digits.

For houses priced below Rp 200 million, it plans to bring down the interest rate to 9.75 percent from the current level at around 13 percent. Customers buying houses priced at above Rp 200 million, meanwhile, will see the interest rate drop to 9.9 percent.

“We expect the decrease in the interest rate of the KPR to increase the people’s demand for housing, especially to buy their first house,” BTN director Handayani said.

Public Works and Public Housing Ministry housing financing scheme director Didi Sunardi admitted the government currently had no specific policy to address housing financing problems faced by middle class people earning above Rp 4 million each.

“We will evaluate this. But we currently don’t regulate commercial houses — just for the low-income people,” he said.