[OC] Housing has become increasingly unaffordable in Singapore, more so than in other high-cost citiesjeronimo002 t1_ivxz6a8 wrote
This is very misleading!
the goverment helps with housing a looot over there.
the % of houses that are on sales are very expensive because they are for the richest % in the state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dBaEo4QplQ&ab_channel=PolyMatter
Throwawaytehpengcup t1_ivy9wqq wrote
Even with the generous government subsidies HDB flats (both resale and BTO) are rediculously expensive. Also to qualify for the higher tier subsidies requires you to earn a lower monthly salary, so your best bet is to BTO/ buy a resale when you are unemployed or in college with your college sweetheart.
Also now the required downpayment has increased from 10% to a whooping 20% now. Who the hell has 80k sgd in their bank account at their late 20s???
Inner-Patience t1_ivydj93 wrote
Downpayment can be paid using cpf. Assuming your monthly CPF contribution is 1k (which isn't a lot considering there's employee and employer portion), that's 12k a year without including in bonus. If based on CPF account allocation (OA, SA, MA), it's 23% of salaries that can be used for housing downpayment.
Working 4 years there's already almost 50k CPF for downpayment for just one person, and usually housing is funded by two persons. I would say that's achievable in the late 20s
[deleted] t1_ivyduja wrote
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jeronimo002 t1_ivydf3c wrote
Housing is ridiculously expensive worldwide.
The sittuation however is much better than hongkong!
Comparing it to the US makes ZERO sense. Singapore was still a develloping country in 1992 while today, the US is becoming a develloping country if they continue on their track.
Singapore has a considerable higher purchasing power than hong kong
You can't point to a single cause, but probably housing has catapulted Singapore above what it could be if it took the hong kong approach.
Singapore has overtaken the GDP per cap by 50% compared to hong kong in the graphs period and the prices don't show that.
again, the whole world has expensive houses (Neoliberalism does that). the US and Europe have the same problems, probably even worse!
ExHax t1_ivy1x3h wrote
Im sure youre not in singapore
no-name-here t1_ivy2alm wrote
why do you say that? What this chart shows is price change relative to an arbitrary starting point. It does not show how affordable is relative to income, which is the important thing.
Edit:
>In the study, housing in Singapore is the most affordable, with a price-to-income ratio of 4.5 for HDB units. As mentioned earlier in the report, more than 80 percent of Singaporeans live in HDB units (figure 8). Although the price-to-income ratio for private homes is high at 13.3, private homes represent less than 20 percent of all housing stock and cater to wealthy Singaporeans and foreigners. ...
> [Singapore's] high homeownership rate of nearly 90 percent and the low cost of government housing units (known as HDB units) directly stem from the government’s consistent commitment and policies to provide affordable and good-quality housing to its citizens.
Source: Urban Land Institute Asia Pacific Home Attainability Index published 2022-08-25 (PDF page 16). "This report analyses housing attainability in 28 cities in five countries: Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea."
ALJY21 t1_ivyb876 wrote
Even if that’s the case, would you argue that income increases for the other global cities listed here are significantly less than Singapore?
no-name-here t1_ivycuks wrote
But how would that be more important than housing prices as a multiple of income? Whether other countries went up more or less, if housing was a lower multiple of income in Singapore, would relative increases or decreases be more important to you? I've added a source in my parent comment as well.
Per the study above, Singapore housing costs were 4.5 times income, whereas another city had housing that was >40 times income.
If housing started out costing 1% of your income, then increased to 6.5% of your income, that would show as 6.5 in the OP chart. Whereas if another theoretical city had housing costs go from 45% of your income to 60% of your income, that would show up as only a 0.33 increase on the OP chart, or ~1/20 as much of an increase, even though the final cost was ~10x higher in the second location, and even though the absolute change was 3x as much. But you can't tell any of those things when you're only shown relative increases of 6.5x and 0.33x.
ALJY21 t1_ivymbq8 wrote
It’s not more important, but as important.
It’s two different sets of data; they tell different stories. OP’s data shows that income did not keep pace with housing, although this could be the same with the other cities. I agree that absolute data could have been useful.
Your cited data does imply affordability in Singapore, but I might question it’s methodology. Is it really affordability if household income is being held up by the rapid rise of dual income households in Singapore? Is the trend of dual income households the same for these other countries? They might seem more expensive because dual income % may have not seen similar growth. This is why despite how “affordable” Singapore seem to be, it is a huge struggle to have a family. Nobody in the household can afford to stop working.
What’s going to happen to single person breadwinners for example, if the government uses dual household income as a gauge for affordability (as they are now)? What used to be affordable for single income households now requires dual incomes to sustain.
Therefore, a more robust way would be to calculate single income over price/sqm ratios instead of household income vs house (which can vary in size)
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