[dreijs]

I currently live in an HDB property in Singapore. It's great.

I'm originally from the Netherlands, which traditionally had a strong social housing sector: regions and cities would have their own housing corporations ('woningbouwcorporaties') tasked with building affordable housing. Those corporations were given government support after 1950 to help with the post-WW2 housing shortage, but were semi-privatized in the mid-90s, and in 2015 their scope was strongly curtailed.

It would be reductive to say that this privatization was the sole cause of the current housing crisis affecting the Netherlands -- rents and housing prices have also increased a lot in Singapore since Covid -- but it probably didn't help.

[eru]

Rents and housing prices went down a lot in Singapore during Covid. So them going up again afterwards is just a reversion to the mean.