Singapore: Who Gets to Be Crazy Rich?

The Pay Check

Bloomberg

Society & Culture, Business, Investing

4.4 • 630 Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Singapore's carefully controlled housing market has been a key factor in its economic success over the last 60 years. But when the pandemic ushered in the city's worst-ever recession, property prices continued to rise, leading a younger generation to worry if it can match the social mobility enjoyed by their parents. In this episode of The Pay Check, we examine the grand housing experiment that helped Singapore to reach one of the highest rates of homeownership in the world, and recent developments that have left ordinary Singaporeans asking whether the system is still working for them. Reporter Faris Mokhtar meets the man who helped create the city's housing boom, as well as the young professionals grappling with the market today.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:04.2	A warming planet, complex geopolitics and fierce competition means business operations are under more scrutiny than ever before.
0:13.0	Returning to Singapore this July, the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit is uniting leaders and investors
0:19.0	to explore how sustainability efforts can bolster resilience
0:23.0	and mitigate risk. Learn more at Bloomberg.com slash SBS-Sdash Singapore. That's Bloomberg
0:29.7	live.com slash SBS-S-S Singapore. The Singapore of Today, the one featured in crazy rich Asians, with its luxury shopping malls, mansions, and an airport complete with a butterfly garden and a movie theater.
0:52.3	That's a relatively new phenomenon.
0:55.0	Less than 60 years ago, Singapore was newly independent and incredibly poor.
1:01.0	Three-quarters of the city's population lived in overcrowded slums, without electricity or proper sanitation.
1:08.0	The environment was extremely bad.
1:10.0	Just to prove it to you, you could actually blindfold yourself and you know you're at Singapore River. Why? It could smell the sewer in Singapore River. That's the Singapore we were in those days.
1:25.3	That's Liu Tai Kerr, and he's one of the main reasons the city is so different today.
1:30.5	People call him the architect of modern Singapore.
1:34.4	Lou always had dreams of bettering his circumstances and those of the city he grew up in.
1:39.9	At a young age, he decided to study architecture, so he could one day help build up Singapore.
1:46.1	His studies took him to Australia, then Yale, and then to New York, where he worked for the famed architect, I.M. Pei.
1:54.2	Then he got the opportunity he had been preparing for.
1:57.4	In 1969, Lou was asked to come back to Singapore to join its recently established
2:02.7	Housing Development Board, or the HDB. Its goal was to improve the city's housing conditions.
2:08.6	The government of Singapore decided, if we want to have a sustainable city compatible with all the other larger countries, we must achieve excellence.
2:23.3	And one of the signs of removing backwardness is to remove the squatters and house everybody
2:32.2	in housing.
	...

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