The United States Does For Housing What Singapore Had For Cars

Forbes

01-04-2025

There is a great article in the New York Times about Singapore's policy on cars which makes it prohibitively expensive to own and drive a car. I thought it would be a great interesting to take the article and roughly replace the word 'car' in the article with the word 'housing' and 'Singapore' with 'the United States.' Reading the article with the lens of housing falls into the category of Hubert Humphrey's ad deriding the idea of Spiro Agnew as Vice President as 'it would be funny if weren't so serious.'
The article, titled, Why Driving in Singapore is 'Like Wearing a Rolex, is replete with opportunities to call out the similarities with how we handle housing in the United States. It starts with the headline itself. Why Housing in the United States is 'Like Wearing a Rolex.' Here's a really good language swap from the article. Here's the original paragraph.
'Singapore, an island city-state that is smaller than New York City, charges drivers thousands of dollars just for the right to buy a vehicle. The price of the permits, which were introduced in 1990 to limit pollution and congestion, rises with a car's value.'
Here's my Mad Lib version.
'New York, an island city that is bigger than Singapore, charges people who need housing thousands of dollars just for the right to buy or rent a home. The price of the permits, and zoning which was introduced in 1920s to limit greed and profiteering, rises with a home or apartment's value.'
There's even the hard luck story so common in housing stories in the United States. There's the story of Joy Fang who bought an old Hyundai three years ago for $58,000, 'nearly twice the price the pre-permit price of a new model of that sedan.' Shocking. I'm not even going to link to one of the thousands of stories that highlight how much a person or family is spending on renting a home or buying one.
Here's the Times about Fang's car.
'Each month the couple pays about $1,400, or more than 10 percent of their household budget, for the car, the permit, and other expenses like road taxes, fuel and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.'
Here's my version, doctored up for housing in the United States.
'Each month the couple pays about $4,400, or more than 30 percent of their household budget, for the house, the zoning permits, and other expenses like property taxes, other taxes, and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.'
But here's the big difference between the hassle of owning and driving a car in Singapore and housing in the United States: in Singapore there are substitutes.
Another subject in the Times story says,
'We're not sitting in traffic for two or three hours just to get to work.' The resident of Singapore articulates that 'having an efficient public transport system also makes it easier for Singaporeans to not use a car, and he takes it himself when he needs to go downtown.'
There is no substitute for housing. If a public policy taxes and regulates a commodity to the point that it is far too painful to buy and own it, but offers alternatives, then people will likely give up the commodity. In the case of Singapore, the Times story notes,
'There is little reason for many Singaporeans to own a car. Most residents rely on an expanding and affordable public transportation system that stretches across the island. Even long journeys cost less than 2.50 Singapore dollars, or about $2, and ride-hailing platforms such as Grab are plentiful.'
The substitute for owning a home in the United States is renting, but what is the substitute for renting? There isn't one. When poor people are pressed because housing is too expensive, they're faced with the same challenge Fang describes, cutting back on other necessities or trying to effectively manage limited cash flow.
To me, it is clear, Singapore decided to constrain the ownership and operating of a car for policy reasons – climate change, infrastructure savings etc. – but it also created an off ramp (pun intended) for people to find alternatives to owning and operating a car.
Zoning and other regulations, taxes, fees, and fines for housing in the United States function just like the limits on car ownership in Singapore, except that public policy here has failed to provide any alternatives. Instead, if we follow the analogy, we create limits on owning and renting a home, then we limit the supply of subsidized alternatives with even more regulation making the cost of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing, for example, prohibitive too. Imagine if Singapore did what it has done with cars but limited ridership of public transit, produced very routes, and created waiting lists for a trip. Whatever one thinks of Singapore's policy, applying it to housing through zoning and regulation is misguided at best and at worst, a cruel punishment for people who earn less money.