Housing Affordability in Singapore: Can We Move from Public to Private Housing?

Abstract

With 84 per cent of the Singapore resident population housed in public housing, the ultimate dream for many is to move into private housing, which is generally considered to offer better quality and more exclusive living. This article is concerned with the enabling factors of affordability in housing mobility. It examines the Singapore public housing homeowners' affordability of private housing, suggesting a measure of that affordability. The survey findings indicate that only a small percentage of public homeowners can afford to move to median-priced private apartments. The number is even smaller for the relatively more expensive landed housing with own garden. On a theoretical level, the study demonstrates that the use of multiple methods to measure housing affordability is beneficial as more affordability determinants are included in the measurement.

Keywords:

• Housing affordability
• measuring methods
• public-private housing mobility
• Singapore public housing

Notes

1. Public housing development in Singapore is characteristically of the high-rise high-density nature. The apartment block of flats may range in height from 4-storey to 40-storey. The size of public flats mainly ranges from one room to five rooms. A four-room flat typically about 90 sq. m is considered the most popular type of public flats. The price of new public flats is subsidised. See Wong and Yeh (1985) for further discussion of the various types of flats.

2. This represents the first study of its kind in Singapore. There are no available time series data on the topic.

3. Public owner occupiers from 24 public housing towns were considered. Within each town, only building blocks with four rooms, five rooms and executive flat types were identified for survey. However, in the absence of a listing of homeowners in the towns, housing units were randomly selected within the identified blocks until the pre-defined sample size for each town was fulfilled.

4. Private housing transaction records between 1 July 1999 and the cut-off date 26 May 2000 drawn from the private housing transaction database maintained by the Singapore Institute of Surveyors and Valuers were used as a sampling frame for a random selection of private household respondents. The database also provided housing transaction price as well as related hedonic housing factors.

5. The number of households living in those specified types of housing will be preferred, but such information is not available at the time of this study.