SINGAPORE — After affordable and accessible housing in the country was discussed in Parliament this week, one Reddit user asked with some exasperation why the government doesn’t want to review their BTO (Built to Order) concept.
“Why garment never stop to think about the high resale price is primarily due to couples not willing to wait 3 to 5 years for BTO? It is a long wait, there isn’t many years for young adults. Due to NS, male tend to finish their university at around 24 or 25 and for female around 22 or 23. Asking young adults to wait many years for BTO is a very difficult thing to do. Especially when having a house of their own signify the start of their new life,” wrote u/Lu5ck on r/singapore on Wednesday (Feb 8).
The post author went on to call BTO “a reactive approach towards housing needs” aimed at not overburdening Singapore’s finances, but asked if this approach is suitable for Singapore, particularly with people not willing to wait, but who are “thus willing to buy houses at high prices.”
u/Lu5ck appeared to suggest that the former scheme, Registration for Flats System (RFS), had been a better one, calling it a proactive approach to build flats ahead by predicting demand.
“Today, BTO evidently is incapable of keeping up with demands thus shouldn’t we consider reinstating a revised RFS scheme?”
One netizen answered him by saying, “Because people who own flats will technically lose money from their future sale of flats They are afraid of losing votes from these people which is actually the majority right now.”
“People want to have their cake and eat it. They want quality and cheap housing upon purchase, but they also want it expensive when they sell,” observed another.
One wrote, “Because they let people change the mindset from hdb being a resource to have a place to live and build a family and life to an economic asset.”
A Reddit user who had difficulty getting housing wrote, “It’s like getting caught between a rock and a hard place. Either wait more than half a decade for a BTO or pay a lot more for resale.”
The post author later amended it, adding, “The key takeaway is I think we should have some public housings built ahead, “some” because we still need to be mindful that not everyone want housing available relatively soon but we do have people who want it relatively soon. There are people who are willing to pay high price to get it ASAP and current so-called cooling measure doesn’t help these people at all. So, having two different schemes will make up for each other weaknesses thus able to serve greater variety of populations’ needs and at the same time solving the root cause of the demands which result in a better form of cooling measure.” /TISG