21 Singapore
Smith
21.1 Housing
There’s one important regard in which Singapore is leaving Ireland in the dust, and that’s housing. The reason Singapore has all of this housing, of course, is the country’s fabled “public” housing policy.
The government of Singapore owns most of the land, and has a government agency called the Housing Development Board (HDB) that builds a ton of housing. It then sells this housing, mostly to first-time homebuyers (i.e. young people), at a cheap price. who are then free to resell it. The combination of the discount for first-time buyers and the government’s ability to make prices appreciate slowly and steadily over time means that HDB apartments function not just as a cheap place to live, but also as a sort of wealth-building pension system. In other words, in Singapore there’s no contradiction between using your home as a place to live in, and using it to build wealth!
The government doesn’t actually sell HDB apartments to people; it sells them 99-year leases. If a lease has 98 years left on it, that’s pretty close to ownership, and so when Singapore’s system started out, it was basically a homeownership system (in fact, Singaporean homes that are called “freehold”, or privately owned, are technically on 999-year leases!).
Remember that Singapore was founded in 1965, so no 99-year leases have had time to expire yet. But in a few more decades, it’ll become a big pain in the neck, since people whose leases expire will have to move to new apartments. And people are now starting to think about that day, which is messing up the market for leases and causing some apartments to start depreciating.
Singapore’s HDB system is an absolutely amazing solution to the housing problems that afflict most other nations. Basically, the government owning and developing the land allows it to control housing supply so as to produce abundant affordable housing and predictable slow appreciation.