Yet huge plots of land right in the centre of the city are kept vacant for years and then rented, together with the enormous residences and outbuildings sitting on them to two senior Ministers at what appear to be rents that are very significantly lower than those in the private sector for Good Class Bungalows (GCBs) sitting on much smaller plots. As I have said continuously and loudly, why is it that land value maximisation does not seem to apply when the land is used to benefit a very tiny elite group of Singaporeans, namely the Law Minister and the man who appoints the CEO of the agency leasing the land, Shanmugam, and the Foreign Minister, Vivian Balakrishnan.

The Kranji site is 120 hectares, according to state media mouthpiece Today Online, which is about 1,292,000 square feet. Surely it is less valuable than the Ridout Road properties, which collectively amount to approximately 450,000 square feet and 560,000 if 24 Ridout Road is included. After all Ridout Road is much closer to Orchard Road and the city centre. Again it is overwhelmingly clear that two standards apply. One for elite PAP Ministers, their friends and cronies and rich foreigners at whom these palatial properties are targeted. Another for ordinary Singaporeans.

It is particularly insulting to Singaporeans when their Government lectures them on the value of the land and how it is important to safeguard the rights of future generations. It’s always left conveniently vague who these future generations are but since the birth rate here has dropped to about half the replacement level it’s bound to be people who were not born here.

Before Singapore became independent huge tracts of land were occupied by mostly low income Chinese families forced to move out of the city centre and who would often have difficulty establishing title to the land. According to ST articles dating back to 1956, approximately 425,000 Singaporean residents lived in these kampungs.

In the 1950s the British colonial government in Singapore began the biggest public housing development project in the whole Empire, via the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) the forerunner of HDB. But these flats being small were not popular with the previous kampong dwellers and many chose to remain in their urban kampongs making it very difficult to relocate them

Starting in 1961 and throughout the 1960s these settlements mysteriously burnt down. The most infamous of these was the Bukit Ho Swee fire. These incidents of kampong fires which I well remember reading about in the newspapers as a boy, provided an opportunity for the new PAP government to rehouse kampung residents and redevelop the land. This was a pivotal development for the PAP who had taken over the city government from the British and who took over the SIT project.

Many of these kampung dwellers would probably have enjoyed rights to the land had they lived on had the owner not asserted their ownership of the land for at least 12 years. Much of the land was state land. If there was a private landlord usually the land was acquired by the Government for a fraction of its true value even then. The process of Government land acquisition, or more appropriately land theft, went on through the 1960s and 1970s and even today. Even though the payments were a pittance compared to the land’s value the purchase still had to be funded out of revenues collected from Singaporeans in taxes and fees.

When the Government says that Singaporeans need to pay the true market value of the land, not its historical value, you’re effectively being asked to pay twice for the land, once when it was purchased (taken from the people) and again when you’re forced to buy overpriced housing on a 99 year leasehold from the Government which now has an effective monopoly. The PAP is fond of saying that there is no such as a free lunch but you’re effectively being forced to buy your lunch twice, and in at most 99 years you will have to buy it again. The land should have belonged to us in the first place and we should not be accused of “draining the reserves”,” which is how the government defines not valuing the land at its true market value*, when we have already paid for the land once. (*though “market’ means something completely different when Shanmugam and Balakrishnan wish to make use of state resources),

This reminds me of an old joke in which different economic systems or ideologies are explained by reference to cows. Here’s a screenshot:

As expected from a party with the British Union of Fascists symbol, the PAP’s housing policy seems best approximated by the Fascist description except of course we are talking land not cows. You owned the land in the first place. The government takes the land from you for a fraction of its true value, using your tax dollars. It then builds housing blocks on it, in dribs and drabs to keep supply scarce and artificially inflate prices, then makes you pay for the housing through a scheme of excessive enforced savings which again drives prices up. After you finish paying for the housing and the land beneath it goes back to the government. Each successive generation of HDB blocks is of much greater density so that you are perpetually having your share of the land shrunk. Don’t even get me started on the conveyancing the majority of which at one point went through Lee and Lee. Then of course we abolished inheritance tax, ostensibly to encourage wealth investment from overseas but of course thereby hiding the wealth of our own elite family members such as Lee Kuan Yew and his son Lee Hsien Loong. Yet this government under Lee dares to lecture us on tightening our belts whilst denying any value to us (except of course for an elite group of Ministers) from the land they took re-valued and then sold back to us for a temporary period of time.

Published by kjeyaretnam

I'm a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That's why I've never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I'm quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don't work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I'm a liberal. I'm not sure what the middle think of me. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I'm a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I'm not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean. View all posts by kjeyaretnam