Street walkers are not the only ones who are banned in Joo Chiat, the URA has also banned new diners from operating as sit-in restaurants.

Relational Goods was told by URA, which is in charge of issuing dine-in licenses to pack up its tables and chairs in anticipation of increased congestion at the intersection of Joo Chiat Place and Everitt Road.

The place has other popular eateries and restaurants like Fei Fei Wan Tan Mee King and Smokey’s.

In the past, the residents in this area have complained that their driveways have been blocked by cars driven by patrons of these eateries.

To mitigate this problem, the owners of Relational Goods negotiated with the nearby Church to use their parking lots for their customers in order to ease the parking menace in the vicinity.

Despite their efforts, URA did not budge and said that they can only operate as a take-away outlet.

But wouldn’t take-away outlets compound the issue further?

It would only encourage more drivers to park indiscriminately so that they can grab their food on the run.

Where’s the spirit of entrepreneurship that the government is encouraging?

If you want to have a snapshot view of how dramatically Singapore has changed politically, economically and socially just take a drive around Sentosa Cove, the only residential enclave that boasts exclusive oceanfront living for Singaporeans and foreigners.

Executive Adrian Tan, who had the rare chance to drive in, described it this way: “It is like driving into Beverly Hills. The bungalows don’t have fences and the beach is all yours and only yours.”

Throwing S$30 million at a bungalow is quite common. That is also the only place where foreigners can buy a landed property without asking for permission.

The Merdeka Generation that joined in the gamble with Lee Kuan Yew to build a “democratic nation based on justice and equality” might wonder if this is the Singapore they had put their money on.

Politically, the country has moved so far away from the socialist roots the ruling party was embedded on.

The PM’s recent speech has given some hope that this shift could change.

The white and white attire (to show a sense of ideological purity) worn by the People’s Action Party politicians at party functions, the official dictate for ostentatious (including waterfront) living and the principle of giving every Singaporean a good life were examples of its socialist ideals.

Economically, the country was Singaporean-centric that made sure every citizen had a decent-paying job and equal opportunities. As it transformed itself from marshland to metropolis with foreigners, especially the super rich, cruising in to work, live and play here the national core is showing signs of distress.

It is the social sphere that is seeing the biggest impact. As the Sentosa Cove people float in their private yachts enjoying champagne and caviar, a growing group of Singaporeans are struggling to make ends meet.

Singapore’s Gini coefficient, designed to show income inequality, was 0.452 last year, say OECD reports. It is the worst in the developed world.

At the other end of the scale, the country has the dubious distinction of being a place where the super rich amass their wealth super fast.

A Barclays report in 2013 showed that 51 per cent of high-net worth individuals in Singapore became rich in less that 10 years, topping the world’s charts.

The number of people with more than $1million in investible assets reached about 133,000 in 2015, about double the level in 2010.

Singapore is becoming one big party town with people like Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook, and Australian mining tycoon Nathan Tinkler setting up home here and entertaining their friends and clients in trendy nightspots where their bills can go up to tens of thousands of dollars.

But not everybody is part of this party as the everyday stresses of living in a tight squeeze of a city are more in many people’s minds.

So, when PM Lee Hsien Loong said if he could persuade 10 more billionaires to move to Singapore, he would, even if that worsened the income divide, there was a sense of resignation all round.

“…billionaires bring business, they will bring opportunities, they will open new doors, they will create new jobs,” said the PM.

No one, not even the Merdeka Generation, would want a return to the backwater days of old Singapore.

But the question is whether this relentless pursuit of the fleshy and the flashy should continue at such full speed – and whether

Singaporeans should be allowed to claim back some aspects of the nation’s old-world charm.

A fitting time to reflect as Singaporeans look towards marking the country great again.

This article was first published in 2013 and updated in 2021. 

Of all the statistics that are thrown at the property-obsessed Singaporean, the most ignored, but most worrying, is the one that speaks volumes about the dark hole that the country is digging for itself.

The money stashed away in residential property is hitting a payback of more than than 4 per cent of GDP; in many other modern economies that figure is just a blip.

The hunger for amassing property is reaching the stage where owning a second, third, even a fourth one, is talked about without batting an eyelid.

For a country whose economy is maturing, putting so much money into a non-productive sector like property will make this a country of landlords, not of businessmen and innovators.

The government is very mindful of how this property play will affect the country’s long-term prosperity.

But its hands are tied somewhat. It is caught in a classic squeeze of wanting to act decisively and not wanting to go the full hog because of a political backlash.

Home-ownership was the government’s showcase policy since it took power in 1959. Now nearly 90 per cent of Singaporeans own their homes. Down the road, this well-intentioned policy morphed into encouraging young citizens to upgrade and older citizens to downgrade.

It was to feed into the aspirations of the former and to unlock the property treasure trove of the latter so that the senior citizens will have spare cash to live their august years in retired bliss.

People who live in their first homes for a long time is a rarity with buying and selling properties a norm these days. Property conversations are almost always about how much a home can be sold for.

Singaporeans have become nomads in their own country.

In this kind of frenzy, it will be political suicide for a government to think about acting decisively to cool the market.

Since 2009, the government tried to cool the market seven times. Each action brought about a similar result. The rate of home sales went down a little, but picked up a few months later.

As Institute of Policy Studies research associate Christopher Gee has said in a newspaper interview: “Incremental measures have unintended consequences in encouraging more people to jump in because they think there will be another round coming and thus act to lock in a property now.”

That accelerates demand, which explains why the seven measures have not been very effective.

For example, sales of new private homes in June 2013 surged 23.8 per cent when compared to the figure in May.

The bigger worry is the likelihood that the interest rate regime might have a shorter life span in the coming years.

If that happens, the highly-leveraged Singaporean will face a tough time paying off his mortgages.

Ratings agency Moody’s has entered the scene ringing the alarm bell: The ratio of Singapore dollar loans to deposits hit a six-year high at 79 per cent last year.

And household-debt has risen 40.4 per cent since 2009 but monthly incomes went up only 26.3 per cent.

The agency even took the rare step of downgrading Singapore’s banking system from “stable” to “negative” because of the institutions’ exposure to loans and mortgages. The government has shrugged this off, saying the banking system is doing fine.

Mindful of the pothole-ridden road ahead, the Monetary of Singapore Authority had acted earlier by getting banks to take into account all of a borrower’s outstanding loans, including for cars and credit cards, when assessing mortgage applications. Total repayments cannot be higher than 60 per cent of gross monthly income.

It is clear that there are not that many options left for the government as citizens continue to tie themselves up in property betting.

Singaporeans will soon have to realise that, like all forms of lotteries, property is not a one-way bet.