While the country has one of the highest rates of homeownership around the globe, the high property prices are a cause for concern for Liu Thai Ker, the man behind Singapore’s Housing Development Board otherwise known as “the architect of modern Singapore.”
Mr. Liu Thai Ker expressed his worries in a recently published Bloomberg interview. He spoke to Bloomberg’s Faris Moktar and was included among those heard on the latest episode of The Pay Check podcast, entitled “Singapore: Who Gets to Be Crazy Rich?” and released on June 22.
In spite of the Covid-19 pandemic and the shrinking economy that followed it, property prices have only continued to rise. More and more properties in Singapore costing millions of dollars have been reported, as the property market has gotten pricier.
The average private property now costs about 15 times of median household earnings, which is higher than in New York, London, and San Francisco, Bloomberg noted.
“I do worry that nowadays, public housing prices is really a business venture than actually solving the housing need.
I feel that the implication may not be very good for the economic development of Singapore,” Mr. Liu can be heard saying on the podcast.
Traditionally, Singaporeans have been able to purchase HDB units at a low cost and then flip it for a much higher selling price later on, which ensured that their personal wealth would grow.
This could later lead to a growing inequality gap between different economic groups, which could perhaps lead to social unrest.
He told Bloomberg that the original goal was not only to build housing but communities.
“We broke down new towns into neighborhoods. And within each precinct, I wanted to make sure we have one to five-room flats together. But not just anyhow. You don’t mix one and three together because the economic gap is too big, it will create envy.
You can only mix one and two-room flats and then two and three-room flats. So all these things have been built into the hardware.”
Singapore’s carefully-designed housing success did not happen by luck, every little bit was a result of hard work and hard thinking.
He added that taking care of the country’s most valuable resource—humans—should be of prime concern.
“The only resource we have in Singapore is human beings, and we have to look after our human beings to survive as a country.
So, first of all, you have to satisfy the basic human needs: to clothe them, feed them, to give them housing, to have good transportation.
This is very important. Because if you don’t have a home, first of all, you cannot concentrate on your work.
And second, our public housing [agency] is probably one of very, very few in the world that built housing not just to rent but to sell. When you own your own property, then you will feel that you have taken root in society.
And you will also want to defend the country and help build the economy. So, homeownership is another very important factor in the success story of public housing,” Bloomberg quotes Liu Thai Ker as saying. /TISG
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