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Ep 28: Singapore's Public Housing with Chua Beng Huat
UCLA Housing Voice
English - June 29, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 53.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 86 ratingsSocial Sciences Science housing affordable housing housing affordability housing supply tenant protections housing research land use research housing policy unaffordable rent rising rent Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
“The government and its housing agency are thus constantly, indeed permanently, engaged in acts of balancing competing demands.” This is the situation that the Housing & Development Board, which builds public, owner-occupied housing for the vast majority of Singapore’s citizens and permanent residents, has created for itself. And they’ve been phenomenally successful at maintaining that balance: 85% of Singaporeans own a public housing unit — on a 99-year lease, not permanently — and prices for new homes have stayed relatively affordable for decades. What did it take to get there, where has Singapore’s leadership fallen short along the way, and what lessons can be exported to other nations? Professor Chua Beng Huat of the National University of Singapore and Yale-NUS College gives us a detailed history of the small island nation’s public housing program, and explains how a responsive government and a program of constant policy “patches” keeps it all running.