[OC] Housing has become increasingly unaffordable in Singapore, more so than in other high-cost citiesno-name-here t1_ivy2alm wrote
Reply to comment by ExHax in [OC] Housing has become increasingly unaffordable in Singapore, more so than in other high-cost cities by earthlymonarch
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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