The gall, the gall! these people have to "welcome reforms" announced at NDR and call for even deeper changes to public housing. I have to say these past few weeks have been quite nauseating, not only because of the attempts by the opposition to steal some of the limelight from Lawrence Wong, but how they try to portray themselves as enlightened reformers.
Dumb & dumber
It's pretty ironic that – of all the topics they could choose – they went for public housing. It's one area where both opposition parties have been outbidding themselves on ignorance, incompetence or outright manipulation.
Let's remind everybody that before the pandemic the Workers' Party questioned not the lack of supply of HDB apartments but its apparent glut, which would in their view lead to problems down the line.
The party leadership tried to argue that the added supply would come from their Universal Sale and Lease Back (USB) scheme, conveniently omitting the fact that only flats with 30 years of tenure left would qualify.
There are currently no such public flats in Singapore and won't be for another couple of decades.
Of course the party is so ignorant of realities of living on the ground that it shallowly focused merely on the rise of resident population as a proxy for determining housing demand, rather than the changes to internal structure of the households, which are shrinking in size and dividing.
In other words, while in the past many Singaporeans lived in quite cramped conditions, not infrequently with multiple generations inhabiting one dwelling, today more and more apartments are being left with one or two inhabitants, and a nationwide average of three per household.
Children leaving home to gain some independence or the elderly downsizing to a smaller home, leaving behind the bigger one for young families of their own offspring, contribute to rising demand even with relatively modest increase in overall population of the city-state.
This was even before the pandemic upended our view of housing and work, with more people than ever enjoying hybrid or completely WFH (work-from-home) arrangements with their employers, necessitating upgrades to their apartments – including buying larger ones for more comfort.
Under WP's proposals the housing shortage and, consequently, the housing prices would have now been even higher than they already are.
Although, it has to be said, it's nothing compared to the utter lunacy that PSP has descended into with ideas voiced in the parliament by its former secretary-general, Leong Mun Wai.
His proposal of a grand reform was to make Singaporeans merely rent apartments from the state, at half the price, deferring the rest of the liability (for the land cost) until they one day wish to sell them.
By PSP's own example, a flat in Tengah currently costing $350,000 would "only" cost $140,000. But if you wished to sell it in the future, you would first have to cough up the extra $200,000 + interest. Who would be able to do that?
It doesn't take a genius to understand that unless you commit yourself to paying off a mortgage over many years, little by little, month by month, it would be impossible to suddenly find a lump sum for a buyout, even under preferential conditions, two or three decades down the road.
The sudden cost would be too high to bear, forcing people to stay wherever they lived at the time.
It would completely destroy the public property market in Singapore, with few people owning anything, forever living in one place in a quasi-rental from the state that they couldn't get out of.
Anticipating the problems ahead of time, most would opt for apartments larger than they realistically may need, only to ensure they are not locked into a small home they would find hard to get out of later.
And since those larger apartments require more space, it would drive construction costs up and make time delays even worse.
To makes matters funnier, the resulting financial gap in the national budget would amount to around $7 billion per year:
Unfortunately, there's no word on how PSP would like to finance it, when the recent GST hike alone yielded just around $3.5 billion.
It's a proposal so absurd that you have to question whether any sane person took a look at it before authorising its release.
Workers' Party has clearly misjudged the market reality but PSP just wants to nuke it.
Fortunately, neither of them have a say on the matter, so Singapore continues to enjoy the best public housing system on the planet. No other country comes even close to what it has achieved.
Any ideas to improve it have to be well deliberated, instead of being empty slogans to woo voters to cast their ballots on parties which have no goal other than bruising the PAP, no matter the cost to the society.
