Woke up this morning to this piece of news…heard from my mother, the unofficial broadcaster of all family news, that one of my uncles, a Malaysian PR living in Singapore for the past 15years, decided to give up waiting for the housing prices to turn south and jumped into the resale market as rental costs continue to price him and his wife out. They used to rent a whole HDB unit but now can only afford to rent a room in a HDB flat; with new measures taken by the government, in what can only be seen as “too little too late”, to cool the housing market, he is now required to pay up to 20% downpayment for this flat purchase. They are afraid of any further measures taken against PR’s favor and so they are jumping in quicker than they can think. They paid their option deposit to the real estate agent and are now desperately going around the extended family looking for loans to help them with the $40,000 cash shortfall required for down-payment and other costs such as stamp fees and real estate agent fee.

I find this story to be rather disturbing, not just because it happened so close to me…but because I think this is a representative case of many other lower wage PR workers in Singapore and their plight. (I hate to digress but yesterday I was at a dental visit when a foreign indian couple with a pregnant wife decided against treatment because they can’t afford it, and opted for just taking painkillers instead. Can you imagine being pregnant and having to live with a toothache so bad you can’t sleep? (she told the dentist she couldn’t sleep))

With my uncle’s job being a heavy industry laborer in his 40s, I do not see how he can expect to be financially productive for that many more years. His wife works in a kopitiam and earns $1500 a month (only because she is currently on good terms with the boss and she runs the drinks stall) – she is also in her 40s. The flat they bought was a 3 room flat in Tampines that is 25 years old, looks rather dilapidated, and costs $30k cash above valuation at $300,000. Scouring the internet, this is what this way-overpriced flat would typically look like.

Their jobs are not the progressive type and hence their salaries have been stagnant for many years now. It doesn’t really take a crystal ball for one to foresee that they will end up in dire financial straits a few more years from now, if they are not already in one.

So this is one of the social repercussions that people will have to deal with, just because of Mah Bow Tan and HDB’s collective failure and lack of ability to “predict” market demand and supply for housing, afterwards using a slipshod measure to counter the problem. I really wonder if he did indeed graduate from Operations Research as his major. Supply management can be a very sophisticated science but the way Mah is doing it, swearing by his built-to-order mandate, is outrageously juvenile and borderline stupid…definitely nothing in the  multi-million dollar salary level intelligence going by most people’s standards.

I hope my uncle will clear his head and simply return to Malaysia. He must have forgotten why he came out here in the first place – to create a better life for himself, and he is obviously not doing that here. Something is very wrong with the way Singapore is being run now. But of course you can also choose to ignore all that you’ve read online and pretend all is alright.