Singapore's Quota on Every Block of Flats — Epoche B1
The flat you may not sell to that buyer Most Singaporeans — nearly eight resident households in ten — live in HDB flats, public housing bought and resold on an open market. Open, with one deliberate exception. Since 1 March 1989 the Ethnic Integration Policy has set quotas on that market at two levels. Every neighbourhood has a ceiling for each ethnic group — Chinese, Malay, Indian and others — a few points above the group's national share, and every individual block has a slightly higher one. While a group is under its cap, the rule is invisible. The day a block reaches its cap for one group, a flat there may no longer be sold to a buyer from that group. Price, paperwork, everything else about the sale stays the same; only that one match is blocked. What the rule prevents is drift. Buyers everywhere like to move near kin and community, and block by block, sale by sale, a neighbourhood can tip toward a single group without anyone deciding it should. The quota stops the drift at the stairwell: the families on a landing are, by law, roughly a sample of the country. The rule has a price, and it is not paid equally. A minority owner in a block that has hit the Chinese cap may not sell to Chinese buyers — the largest part of the market — and can wait longer, or settle for less, than a neighbour with an identical flat. That is documented, and it is the honest cost of the arrangement, not a malfunction of it. I grew up on such a landing. The policy decided who my neighbours could be before I was born; it never once told us what to make of each other. References Siddique, S. & PuruShotam, N. (1982). Singapore: Society in Transition. Oxford University Press. Tan, E. S. (2001). Neighbourhoods and the City: Community and Social Relations in Singapore. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.