Different approaches to keeping homes affordable and accessible

Higher home prices fuelled by Covid-19-related construction delays have led to greater anxieties among Singaporeans, including worries by prospective home owners of being priced out of the market.

- Chin Soo Fang

Those who looked to the resale market in recent years would have seen prices rise, with a small but growing number of Housing Board flats transacting at a million dollars or more.

Given such concerns, the matter of how to keep housing accessible and affordable has been debated in Parliament multiple times over this term of government, with political parties putting forth a varied range of solutions.

In December 2021, the PAP government said it was prepared to launch as many as 100,000 new flats by 2025 to meet pandemic-induced demand growth for housing.

Minister for National Development Desmond Lee noted then that there was a growing trend of smaller households as social norms changed.

Meanwhile, the disrupted supply of Build-To-Order (BTO) flats meant some turned to the resale market. The buoyant resale market in turn channelled more demand to the BTO market, and the result was a spike in both BTO application rates and resale prices.

The Government's first priority was therefore to ramp up flat supply and catch up on construction, said Mr Lee.

In March 2025, he told Parliament that HDB was on track to exceed its commitment to build 100,000 flats, the equivalent of building two Ang Mo Kio towns in less than five years.

Two months earlier, HDB completed the last of the 92 pandemic-delayed BTO projects, which meant it had delivered all 75,800 such flats in the last five years.

Another priority was to bring down the waiting time for BTO flats to the pre-pandemic norm of less than four years, which was achieved in 2024.

This was done by building more flats with a shorter waiting time of under three years, with an additional 12,000 such flats to be launched from 2025 to 2027.