Examining the Long-Term Effect of Government Housing Regulations on Spatial Distribution of Residents: A Case Study of Singapore

One commonly observed issue in the vast majority of Asian cities is economic growth that pushes land prices up, especially in urban and inner-city areas. Consequently, lowand middle-income households are priced out of land markets. As affordable housing in Asia is a serious and considerable challenge, governments have implemented housing programmes, policies and institutional arrangements to provide a range of affordable housing alternatives. To assist policymakers with evaluating urban development policies and anticipating trends in the evolution of cities, researchers have significantly improved modern urban land-use-and-transportation (LUT) models. However, few studies focus on the long-term effect of government housing regulations on the spatial distribution of residents. As a result, policy makers and planners have limited tools to test the spatial consequences of government intervention in housing markets after several cycles of slow/fast economic growth and demographic shifts. In order to fill the gap, this study uses Singapore as a case to examine the eligibility rules for allocating public housing, and to study the spatial pattern of various types of households. ______________________________________________________ J. Shaw (Corresponding author) • J. Ferreira Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US Email: [email protected] J. Ferreira Email: [email protected] CUPUM 2015 332-Paper