Trouble in YIMBYland: Singapore's housing

Oliver Kim has a detailed review of a new book on Singapore’s public housing system that complicates the YIMBY movement’s frequent invocation of Singapore as a model. The country houses 76 percent of the population in high-rise public units called HDBs with 99-year land leases, creating a version of the Georgist’s political economy problem: the state is the residual claimant of those structures when the land leases expire. Eventually the government must retake possession and let the terminal value of leasehold HDB homes hit zero. That’s hard to reconcile with residents’ intuitive sense of property ownership. The other challenge is more structural: because Singapore is already mostly high-rise and homeownership-focused, upzoning can’t unlock land value the way it does in American superstar cities dominated by single-family homes. In contexts with large potential density changes, like the US, allowing a developer to build an apartment building where a single-family house stood creates meaningful land value uplift that helps pay for the transition. In Singapore, unless the government increases allowable lot coverage ratios, there’s little additional value to generate from redeveloping existing HDB blocks.