Is Our Housing Policy Secretly Singapore’s Most Effective Birth Control?

Because lately it feels like if you want a child, you need to sacrifice the square footage where it would learn to walk. That’s the first problem that comes to mind – price – when I look at a 25-year loan tenure and long BTO queues. But price may be adjacent to a wider range of factors, such as:

• Space (or rather, the lack thereof)
• Time to household formation 
• Normalisation of dual income 
• Policy-induced anxiety in some folks 

Let’s start with space, and the gradual shrinking of flat sizes. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, 5-room flats could go up to 1,300+ sq ft. We also had executive apartments. Maisonettes. Balcony spaces big enough to launch the next Mars rocket. Some of these layouts were experimental enough to be weird, sure, but at least they gave you room to be weird.

Today, a “spacious” four-room BTO might clock in at 950 sq ft, and that includes things like the household shelter, which isn’t particularly liveable unless your child is an otter. 

Bedrooms have reached the point where, when my neighbour managed to place a queen bed, a full desk, and a wardrobe in the same room, we all gathered to applaud and declare him District Space Planning Wizard.

It’s also a bit annoying that our newest housing types – Prime and Plus flats – the crown jewels of BTOs, launched to anchor great locations and long-term value… don’t come in 5-room sizes. Why? It’s already clear, with the 10-year MOP, that these buyers are far less interested in flipping. 

And this bleeds into the time-to-household-formation problem.

You can’t just shack up early and sort it out later: getting the housing here is the sorting out. Couples queue for BTOs like they’re buying season passes to their own future. By the time they get their keys, some have graduated, married, paid off a wedding loan, and decided it’s way too expensive/exhausting to have a second or third child after all. And that’s assuming they even get the flat, since failed balloting attempts could stretch out the time even further. 

While the obvious solution to this is resale flats, the price kind of gets in the way of this. It’s one thing to wait for a BTO, and it’s another to drop $900,000 on a four-room flat in Queenstown that’s older than your father-in-law’s NS stories. Yes, moving in is finally immediate; but now you’re staring at the Cash Over Valuation, the 54 years left on the lease, and wondering if your child will inherit the flat or the mortgage.

And it’s not just about money. Buying resale often means a different kind of compromise: older plumbing, odd layouts, tile choices that were cool in the ‘70s but feel like a stab in the eyeballs today, etc. So what do many couples do?
They delay. Delay the flat. Delay the marriage. Delay the kid. Delay the life they want to start until housing permits.

Back in the 1990s or earlier, it was also more possible for one partner to not work, without the whole household collapsing into perpetual cup noodle dinners.  

Today? Unless one of you is a high-flyer in the income category, you probably both need to work to afford a 5-room flat (maybe even a 4-room). But when both parents are working full-time – and sometimes beyond full-time – there’s simply less bandwidth to raise a kid, much less multiple kids. And while some families get help from grandparents or a helper, those options come with their own trade-offs: space, privacy, cost, logistics, and, let’s be honest, the delicate politics of who’s “doing it right.”

So yes, we can have children and work. But the way our homes and economy are structured, it can feel like you’re trying to raise children while juggling chainsaws on a tightrope. And we do need to question if we’re getting enough family time with the children, at this particular rate.

And looming over it all is the final boss of housing-related fertility: policy-induced anxiety.

Because even if you clear the affordability hurdle, win the BTO ballot, and feng-shui your bomb shelter into a fortune-maker, there’s still the underlying stress of navigating the system itself. For every couple that feels empowered by grants and MOP timelines, there’s another having a mild existential crisis over whether they accidentally violated some kind of essential occupier rule by listing mum when she only stays over “now and then.”

Want to upgrade later? That’s a whole new maze of ABSD, MSR, and MOP acronyms that you need to navigate. Want to decouple for a second property? Better hope your CPF accounts and the stars are in alignment.

And for those eyeing Prime and Plus flats? You’d better be really sure you’re not going to outgrow that four-room unit, because with the 10-year MOP, you’re not moving to a bigger unit for quite a while. 

Is any of this intentional? We doubt so.

These policies came about with the best interests in mind, like fairness. But when you stack it all together – the shrinking flat sizes, the long queues, the pricing, the resale trade-offs, the two-income grind, and the administrative acrobatics – it starts to look an awful lot like accidental family planning by design.

My point is, the conditions under which we’re supposed to want more children – smaller flats, tight budgets, long waits, and complex policies – don’t exactly scream “start a family now.”

If we’re serious about boosting fertility, maybe it’s time to rethink more than just baby bonuses and leave policies.

Meanwhile in other property news

• Before you cynically brush aside Johor as an investment zone, take note that it’s not just Iskandar 2.0
• URA’s new draft master plan is putting up some 80,000 new homes; here’s what to look out for.
• What are the most important factors to consider among the hundreds of factors, when shortlisting a property? Here’s some expert advice. 
• Join our Stacked Pro readers, as they explore Forest Woods, which may be one of Serangoon’s secret top-performing condos (whatever its ROI may try to suggest.)

Weekly Sales Roundup (16 June – 22 June)

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Transaction Breakdown

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