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Well first off that statistic is not that 90% own their homes in Singapore it’s that 90% of people live in a home that’s owned and not rented. It’s very typical for Singaporeans to live with family until married or into their 30’s.

HDBs are public housing but there are a ton of rules - can’t own one until you are 35 unless married. Need to meet incomes limits. There is a 4-5 year backlog for BTO (build to order - a new HDB).

HDBs prices have skyrocketed, despite the heavy government subsidy. People game the system all the time and because of demand, you enter a lottery for new HDBs and in prime locations, they can be 8-10x oversubscribed. If you win a unit? You won the lottery. You can sell it in 5 years (minimum occupancy period - MOP) on the resale market and pocket a few hundred thousand. Then upgrade or buy a private condo.

The government’s intention was to make it a good investment and now they are backed into a corner like most countries. How to make housing affordable but also a good investment.

They just instituted new rules that restrict who can buy “prime area” HDBs, increased MOP to 10 years and claw back some of the subsidy.

> public housing, .. If you own one, you cannot own a second one.

How is this a downside? That's the only way a subsidizied public housing system could work.

It's ludicrous you are describing the negatives from the perspective of a investor instead of a resident, that was precisely the point of the whole scheme, to make it easier for a regular resident to live, who pays tax and contributes to the local economy.

I didn’t read their comment as explaining this as a negative, just that ownership rates are non comparable.

I guess if it comes to that, I would say the only reason home ownership is measured in such a way and thus a meaningful metric, as a percentage of the population rather total number of units which sounds silly already, is to measure the easiness for the young to build a life. Ownership rates bears little to no meaning if we are considering it in the frame of investment wherever you are.

Yes that is what I meant.

> ...housing, for most cases, a poor investment in Singapore. You buy a home to live in it.

I would consider it a good feature and not a bug.

Unbelievable, those animals! They made a system that encourages people to actually LIVE in the properties that bought instead of trying to speculate and leech from others. Terrible system.

/s

Well it works if everybody is rich to begin with, I guess. Otherwise I could imagine few issues with the approach of having to buy a house to be able to live somewhere.

It could even be a good filter for immigration - only people who can afford to buy a house could be able to migrate there. And surprise, you end up with a population of fairly successful people.

Speaking of leeches (investors) I've got some terrible news for you

There are some bastards out there doing something even worse. Try this, google: "hotel". They won't even let people "live" rather they charge them a steep fee for each 24 hour period spent in this sort of "shelter". It's straight back to the paleolithic era brutality.

It is more complicated than that. Any system as its drawbacks, and the Singaporean system is no different. Presenting just one metric (home-ownership) and showing it as a symbol of success is hiding a lot of complex issues. A similar system would not necessarily work in another place. Typically, being only 728.6 km², relocation is less of an issue in Singapore. This is less true in a lot of nations where having to relocate to another city for work is often a reality. As I pointed out, being able to quickly rent and exit a place is more important in those situation. Therefore, having a supply of renter (companies or individual) is beneficial. In the same idea, because less money is being invested overall in housing, the supply for cheap housing stay very much under a lot of tension. This lead to family sharing the same home for longer (a lot of children staying well past their 20's in their parent home). This is probably one of the important factor explaining a low birth rate.

I think the general idea of trying to push (single) home-ownership my making it increasingly harder and costlier to own more than one property is definitely something that should inspire some politician in country where housing as become a speculative bubble. But this should be done really carefully and with consideration of their own specificities. Done too hastily, it could very well cause a housing crisis, and a housing crisis don't mean just loss of money, it means family on the street.

"especially the one for foreigner,"

That was kind of fun haha :) it wasnt until I hit this sentence that it suddenly dawned on me you were writing everything in the Singlish language!

At least the prices appear to be more reasonable than in London

If you refer to HDB properties and 99 year lease, it’s a fair amount but not all. There’s a fairly large portion of freeholds, which are entirely privately owned.