Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by metapsj 1147 days ago
The Limits of the Singapore Housing Model https://marketurbanism.com/2020/08/05/the-limits-of-the-sing...
1 comments

It's an interesting article but their conclusion appears to be:

> Haila argues that “Singapore has solved the housing problem” but this certainly isn’t true for those shut out from the HDB system.

So it works for the people included, and not for the people excluded. Which is another way of saying it works?

No. The US housing system works for the people included, which is the existing homeowners. Plenty of housing systems work like that.
Here the people excluded are non-residents and non-citizens. So the system works for all residents and citizens, to whom the government is beholden. It could just as easily be extended to include foreign workers, and they've been moving in that direction already. This is an explicit decision not an implicit one. It's not that the system wouldn't be able to support them due to some fundamental or intrinsic issue, it's a choice. That isn't true of the US model.