To safeguard the harmony between communities, the houses are assigned according to strict criteria of balance between Chinese, Indian and Malay. But the persistence of these restrictions even for resale creates imbalances in the market and threatens to create de facto real estate segregation.
Singapore () – Among the essential elements of the policy for the integration of the different components of society promoted by the Singapore authorities is the management of public housing. Houses are awarded according to ethnicity or origin, following a careful balance to avoid inter-ethnic tensions. A complex management system, which, however, shows more and more distorting effects on the real estate market, penalizing immigrant owners in the first place.
Their homes, in fact, tend to have less value: for it to be profitable to sell them, they must be kept for a longer time, counting on price increases in the medium and long term. On the other hand, residents’ reactions are often limited by the risks of exposing themselves to excessive litigation that could further devalue their property’s value.
Adjustments are needed in the policy applied since 1989, especially to avoid de facto racial segregation in housing estates, as Home Secretary K. Shanmugam pointed out at a conference organized a few days ago by the Institute for Political Studies.
The law provides for a quota of apartments for each ethnic group in public housing estates; however, according to the authorities, the established limit has already been reached, and sometimes it has even been exceeded by particular provisions. This de facto forces homes owned by Chinese, Indians or Malays to only be sold to people of the same ethnic group, leading to even longer waits for already dwindling housing opportunities.
Last year there was no shortage of appeals against the refusal of the sale permit: of all applications for resale of public real estate, 30% were accepted, which continues to set a record, although only 1.5% were granted. For this reason, in some cases the properties that the owner has to sell out of necessity are bought back by the public system, to reallocate them later. The system is therefore under pressure, but the small number of problematic situations has so far been managed by intervening in the most selective way possible, even if sometimes there is a risk of creating some social cohesion problems.
A great advance both in this and in other areas of public life could come hand in hand with the application of the Racial Harmony Act (Racial Harmony Law) on which the Ministry of the Interior is working. An initiative that was anticipated two years ago after the inter-ethnic incidents that also revived the debate on the relations between the different ethnic components of Singaporean society.
