Building an equitable and inclusive city through housing policies: Singapore’s experience

• Main Author: PHANG, Sock Yong
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Housing; housing policies; inequality; ethnic segregation; Singapore; Asian Studies; Public Economics; Urban Studies and Planning
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2263; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/3262/viewcontent/10.1201_9780429438141_11_chapterpdf.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Inequality is an age-old concern. In recent years, the rise of income inequality has received worldwide media and policy attention, beginning with the Occupy movement of 2011-2012 and a wave of notable scholastic books such as Stiglitz (2012), Piketty (2014), and Atkinson (2015). Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, an unlikely bestseller, contained a vast amount of data showing that the rich are taking rising shares of income and wealth in the advanced economies. Piketty’s approach towards capital and wealth is an aggregative one, and he does not treat real estate or land as a different or distinct form of capital. He deals with neither spatial inequality nor the role of house price inflation in accentuating inequality. An aspatial approach leads to discussions about solutions to inequality focusing on aspatial aspects of higher income and wealth taxes, health and education policies, and labor market interventions such as minimum wages and universal basic incomes (Piketty, 2014; Atkinson, 2015; IMF, 2018).