It is well known that the majority of Singaporeans live in public housing (that is, housing provided by the Housing and Development Board, or HDB). However, what you may not know is that the majority of residents obtain their housing through a model that shares some high-level similarities with the way we deliver new condominiums in Toronto.
In 2001, the HDB introduced a program known as Build-to-Order (BTO). The way it works is fairly straightforward: the HDB announces a new project, prospective buyers apply and are assigned a queue number, and then, if they're selected, they get to buy. Once a sufficient number of "pre-sales" have been obtained, the project begins construction, and buyers get a brand-new, subsidized apartment in 3 to 5 years.
Singapore also mandates that the apartments must be owner-occupied and so, in this carefully controlled delivery model, supply very closely mirrors demand. This is different from traditional condominium pre-sales where some buyers might be end users, some might be planning to rent out the home, and some might want to sell immediately upon completion. In those markets, the risk of overbuilding and speculative volatility is greater.
HDB classifies the apartments themselves into three groups: Standard, Plus, and Prime. This classification is meant to reflect the locational value of certain projects; but importantly, the intent is that they're all equally attainable to citizens. The difference is that "choicer" locations (their vocabulary — now you have a new Scrabble word) require greater subsidies to make them affordable, and so they come with additional obligations.
For example, in the case of Prime flats, there is a subsidy recovery upon any future sale (I'm told it's between 6-9% of the first resale price), the minimum occupation period (MOP) is 10 years (versus 5 for the Standard class), and you can never ever rent out the whole home, even once the MOP has lapsed. Once again, this is about strictly matching new supply to end-user demand.
It's a lot of rules. But in Singapore, the majority of people accept them in exchange for affordability.
Cover photo: Tengah, Singapore via Monocle
Canadian geographer Mario Polèse's book, The Wealth and Poverty of Regions: Why Cities Matter, is not new. It was originally published in 2010. But it's perhaps a good follow-up to yesterday's post about the untethering of wealth. Here's an excerpt from a review of the book by Jeb Brugmann:
All cities, Polèse explains, share the same basic economic causes and effects. These are economies of localization (i.e., locating activities close together) and of urbanization (i.e., clustering lots of diverse activities together at scale). Polèse shows how these urban economies—usefully distinguished and defined in detail as economies of scale, proximity, diversity and concentration—combine with unique natural features and resource endowments, technology and infrastructure investments, national boundaries and market controls, and historical events to create quintessentially local and unique places. Every time he explains the status of another place—New York, London, Chicago, Paris, Montreal, the northern Mexico border, the North American west coast—he demonstrates again how the source code of geography combines with specific local and historical conditions to create a momentum of wealth or poverty.
The rich may have the means to tax-optimize through physical mobility, but the draw to established urban clusters remains strong, which is why it can be a challenge to stay away from them for more than 183 days. There is a "stickiness" to established cities that is the result of momentum and compounding over centuries.
Still, nothing is guaranteed, and there's only so much that can be done if you're swimming against a global landscape that is shifting away from you. Geography does matter. And today, the world's economic center of gravity is rapidly shifting toward Asia. This is good for some cities and bad for others.
Cover photo by Zhu Hongzhi on Unsplash
We talk a lot about mobility and traffic congestion on this blog — particularly in the context of Toronto — and that's because it remains a problem and we continue to avoid any sort of big and meaningful moves. Instead, we like to politicize the problem and find scapegoats, such as bike lanes. So I think it's important to have regular reminders that we do actually know how to address this problem. It's a choice we and other cities can make.
Here are three examples and possible solutions:
Copenhagen: Over 60% of residents use a bicycle to commute to work or school. It is one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. You've probably heard this before and are prepared to say, "yeah, well, we're not Copenhagen." But it's important to point out that neither was Copenhagen. In the early-to-mid 70s, the modal split for bikes was somewhere between ~10-15%.
Singapore: This is one of my favorite examples. Singapore is home to the world's first congestion charge zone (1975). And it operates on a dynamic pricing model, meaning that traffic congestion is continually monitored and road prices are adjusted to ensure that traffic always flows at certain minimum speed. It's a highly effective tool and there's no shortage of global case studies. Here's Miami.
Zurich: Despite being one of the wealthiest cities in Europe, car ownership is relatively low (~40-45% of the population, compared to ~60-65% in Toronto). This is due to a great public transit system (Swiss trains and stuff) and because of strict parking policies, among other things.
Zurich has a hard cap on the number of parking spaces in the central part of the city. It is set at 1990 levels, which works out to about 7,600 total parking spaces. What this means is that if somebody, like a big bad developer, wants to build off-street parking, they need to simultaneously reduce the parking supply somewhere else. You can't exceed the cap.
This obviously discourages car usage and moderates the demand for city streets, but it also serves as a clever way to slowly replace on-street parking with better uses, such as an enhanced public realm. This policy has been in place since 1989 and it has had a dramatic effect on car usage. Between 2000 and 2021, the share of car trips in the city decreased from 40% to 29%.
I know that many of you will scoff at these solutions and think "yeah, there's no way." But this is how you make traffic better. You reduce demand and use our finite amount of road capacity more efficiently. So we can either make bold moves or we can continue to complain about traffic.
Cover photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash