A comparison of home ownership policies in Singapore and Hong Kong

Abstract

Since the 1960s, as a result of the rapid and outstanding economic growth and industrialization, Hong Kong and Singapore, the two city-states in Asia, were named Asian Dragons among other Asian countries. Historically, both city-states were British colonies, and thus, they both shared similarities in the develop stage of the city in social, economic and political context. In the housing sectors, both city-states have also launched massive subsidized housing programme to facilitate their rapidly growth population with provision of affordable subsidized housing. To assist more residents to become home owners, a series of housing assistance programmes were implemented periodically to help the low and middle income households to climb up to the housing ladder. Despite that the government of Singapore and Hong Kong has implemented similar housing policies approach to their citizens in the beginning stage; yet, as at today, a different achievement in home ownership rate was resulted mainly due to different ruling of governance.

This dissertation will first review the home ownership policies of Hong Kong and Singapore in social, economic and political context. In Chapter 5, evaluation on the effectiveness in the subsidized housing supply, land supply, control of affordability of both city-states will be critically discussed and explained why different home ownership rate of Singapore and Hong Kong was achieved. To make this dissertation more fruitful, in Chapter 6, in-depth interviews with Legco members, scholar and graduated students who have profound knowledge in the housing sector would be discussed and analyzed. Last but not least, political obstacles of Hong Kong would be explained in comparing with Singapore in the final chapter. Recommendation on which part of the housing policies of Hong Kong can be learnt from Singapore will be debated from the result drawn from the key findings and the analysis from the in-depth interviews from the previous chapters.