Ever since getting my big-girl-desk-job, I’ve been receiving a newsletter called ‘New Launches Review’. The sender seems to have found my email address through my employer’s website, indiscriminately blasting their property listings to anyone who works for the organisation I work at. The ‘New Launches’ are always pricey private condominiums. One of the latest emails I’ve been sent is for the One Pearl Bank @ Chinatown apartments. The cheapest unit goes for $1.176 million. It’s funny that they send me these mailers knowing who I work for because the stamp duty alone for that apartment is 70 per cent of what I make in a year.

The One Pearl Bank @ Chinatown complex sits on the site of the former Pearl Bank Apartments, a single horseshoe-shaped building that was iconic for its striking brutalist design. When it was originally built in 1976, it was one of the most densely populated residential buildings in Singapore, with 280 units. The cheapest apartment then would have cost $130,000. That’s only $337,665 in 2021 money. For context, the 2023 development will have 774 units, each apartment dwindling in square footage. The smallest apartment in the 70s would have been three times the size of the million dollar apartment waiting in my email inbox. 

Being priced out of the housing market isn’t a Singapore-specific phenomenon. In Melbourne, where my partner lives, everybody we know rents unless they’ve lucked into an inheritance or some other windfall. Those who have been able to ‘get on the ladder’ – an apt metaphor for the endless toil of servicing a mortgage – have just been hit by the first interest rate increase in Australia in 17 years. Perhaps that’s why an Australian friend was so surprised to hear that I was trying to save for an eventual mortgage. He’d never considered that it was a possibility at all.

Despite the global housing crisis, home ownership in Singapore is possible and largely the norm. According to the Singapore Department of Statistics, 88.9 per cent of households are owner-occupied, meaning that people either own their homes or live with somebody who does. The flip side of this statistic is that very few people rent due to a combination of factors: sky-high rental prices, low availability of rental properties, and the relative ease that most of the population faces in buying a house. Most home owners live in Housing Development Board (HDB) flats – government-built housing on government-owned land. Flats are sold under 99-year leaseholds, allowing the government to repossess and redevelop the land at will. Buyers are encouraged to pay for large portions of their property with their Central Provident Fund, a mandatory social security savings fund, in combination with cash, thus lessening the load on their take-home wages.

Singapore is a land scarce city-state and urban zoning is heavily planned by the government. Foreign observers often laud Singapore's housing model, praising it for effectively managing the city- state’s land scarcity problems while allowing so many citizens to become home owners. However, the government being in control of property sales also allows them control over certain key levers. In order to buy a HDB flat, you should generally fall into one of these categories:

• A member of a heterosexual family nucleus where at least one spouse is a citizen or permanent resident;

• A heterosexual couple that is due to be married (subject to the receipt of a valid marriage certificate);

• An unmarried Singaporean citizen of or above the age of 35.

The official government position is that heterosexual (or ‘traditional’ – their word) family units are the ‘building blocks’ of society. This logic is adhered to so strongly by government policy that single parent households were, up until a few years ago, not able to purchase public housing because they didn't sufficiently qualify as a ‘family nucleus’. This perspective rests on the assumption that family configurations are a choice, and that choice can be influenced by government policy. To some extent, this is true. It’s not uncommon to hear of couples who’ve gotten married early in order to qualify for housing, so that they can move out of their family homes. It's laughable, however, to think that being shut out of affordable housing would convince queer or unmarried individuals to willingly enter straight marriages. Instead, the result is a high proportion of young adults who still live with their families.