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Jamus starts house visits in 2025. 
#TeamSengkang launched our house visits for the new year at 260A #Compassvale, and 325C and 326C #Anchorvale. Over a weekend, we also made trips to the 308 coffeeshop to say hello.
In our conversations, the theme of the cost of living remains front and center of people’s minds. This isn’t just about higher prices at the hawker center or how utilities bills have gone up, as much as they may garner complaints. Most accept that a good part of price fixes are global, and as an open economy that imports most of our food and fuel, we will inevitably import some inflation from abroad.
Rather, many felt the acute pain of higher costs from longer-term perspective: costlier healthcare, ever-pricier cars, and—top of mind for most—how HDB prices have run so far ahead that the next generation are feeling increasingly priced out of the market. And it isn’t just young couples who are dismayed by this, either; a long discussion with a couple that had grown children emphasized how, as parents, they were worried about how their kids would be able to move into a place of their own.
The rising cost of living was a topic that the #workersparty had raised in Parliament at the tail end of 2023. Despite the intervening time—and falling rates of inflation—Singapore’s cost of living remains a problem for many households. This goes beyond what strikes many as short-term palliatives, like bigger one-time handouts or temporary tax relief. Our proposed solutions at the time, which were focused on structural problems and solutions, remain very relevant.
For HDB BTOs, one area that I’ve especially felt was problematic is the stubborn insistence on adhering to land pricing recommendations from the chief valuer. This, in turn, is based off comparables (the land value is typically backed out as a residual from comparable resale prices, after netting out development and other costs). This not only unquestioningly accepts the resale market’s pricing of flats as the benchmark; it also embeds any pricing bubble from existing resale prices into those of new flats, thus creating an adverse feedback loop.
The way government squares this circle of affordability is to offer subsidies and grants to help offset escalating land costs, which results in HDB running at a loss. The reason for not pricing land differently is, ostensibly, because we don’t wish to “raid the reserves” and “steal from future generations.” But surely by financing ever-rising amounts of grants and subsidies, we are just taking from one hand and putting it into the other? Wouldn’t it be simpler and more transparent to just price the land for public housing at a discount—which is what we already do with different tiers for land betterment charges—and not have this roundabout of higher headline prices, that gets offset by higher grants?
Folks may disagree with my diagnosis of how we should handle the rising costs of real estate, of course. But for me, I’m reasonably convinced that land valuations have a significant pass-through effect on a whole range of prices elsewhere in the economy, beyond their direct impact on rentals and house prices. And existing solutions appear to target the symptom, rather than the underlying problem. #makingyourvotecount
Jamus Lim
20 January at 18:10 ·#TeamSengkang launched our house visits for the new year at 260A #Compassvale, and 325C and 326C #Anchorvale. Over a weekend, we also made trips to the 308 coffeeshop to say hello.
In our conversations, the theme of the cost of living remains front and center of people’s minds. This isn’t just about higher prices at the hawker center or how utilities bills have gone up, as much as they may garner complaints. Most accept that a good part of price fixes are global, and as an open economy that imports most of our food and fuel, we will inevitably import some inflation from abroad.
Rather, many felt the acute pain of higher costs from longer-term perspective: costlier healthcare, ever-pricier cars, and—top of mind for most—how HDB prices have run so far ahead that the next generation are feeling increasingly priced out of the market. And it isn’t just young couples who are dismayed by this, either; a long discussion with a couple that had grown children emphasized how, as parents, they were worried about how their kids would be able to move into a place of their own.
The rising cost of living was a topic that the #workersparty had raised in Parliament at the tail end of 2023. Despite the intervening time—and falling rates of inflation—Singapore’s cost of living remains a problem for many households. This goes beyond what strikes many as short-term palliatives, like bigger one-time handouts or temporary tax relief. Our proposed solutions at the time, which were focused on structural problems and solutions, remain very relevant.
For HDB BTOs, one area that I’ve especially felt was problematic is the stubborn insistence on adhering to land pricing recommendations from the chief valuer. This, in turn, is based off comparables (the land value is typically backed out as a residual from comparable resale prices, after netting out development and other costs). This not only unquestioningly accepts the resale market’s pricing of flats as the benchmark; it also embeds any pricing bubble from existing resale prices into those of new flats, thus creating an adverse feedback loop.
The way government squares this circle of affordability is to offer subsidies and grants to help offset escalating land costs, which results in HDB running at a loss. The reason for not pricing land differently is, ostensibly, because we don’t wish to “raid the reserves” and “steal from future generations.” But surely by financing ever-rising amounts of grants and subsidies, we are just taking from one hand and putting it into the other? Wouldn’t it be simpler and more transparent to just price the land for public housing at a discount—which is what we already do with different tiers for land betterment charges—and not have this roundabout of higher headline prices, that gets offset by higher grants?
Folks may disagree with my diagnosis of how we should handle the rising costs of real estate, of course. But for me, I’m reasonably convinced that land valuations have a significant pass-through effect on a whole range of prices elsewhere in the economy, beyond their direct impact on rentals and house prices. And existing solutions appear to target the symptom, rather than the underlying problem. #makingyourvotecount
