Abstract
A shortage of affordable housing has become a major challenge in several cities. Government interventions are widely accepted as necessary to channel resources into housing and to deal with market failures. In an IMF survey, Singapore tops the rankings for government intervention in housing finance and for homeownership. Singapore’s multipronged approach to ensure housing affordability has resulted in a homeownership rate of 91%. Phang considers various housing affordability indicators and proposes that the median resale price of a 4-room HDB flat minus the housing grant available to first-time homeowners should be used for estimating house price to income ratios.
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Notes
- 1.
The 13th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey 2017 covers 406 metropolitan housing markets in nine countries for the third quarter of 2016. A total of 92 major metropolitan housing markets (with more than one million population ) are included, including five megacities (Demographia and Performance Urban Planning 2017). The OECD (https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=HOUSE_PRICES) and the United Nations (https://unhabitat.org/national-sample-of-cities/) also produce PIRs. Accessed 28 Feb 2018.
- 2.
Ibid. The PIRs for the most unaffordable major cities were: Sydney 12.2, Vancouver 11.8, Auckland 10.0, San Jose 9.6, Melbourne 9.5, Honolulu 9.4, Los Angeles 9.3, and San Francisco 9.2.
- 3.
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Phang, SY. (2018). Introduction. In: Policy Innovations for Affordable Housing In Singapore. Palgrave Advances in Regional and Urban Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75349-2_1
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