Housing looks, on paper, like another line in a household budget. But in reality, it serves more like a door to opportunity. It influences whether workers can move up the career ladder, whether children can attend better schools, whether families can get
easier access to healthcare and community support and whether older adults can age with stability and dignity.
When housing becomes unaffordable, downstream consequences, such as the loss of mobility, confidence and some measure of social cohesion, begin to rear their ugly heads.
The scale of the gap between aspiration and reality is not in dispute. A staggering 80% of cities worldwide do not offer affordable housing options for the majority of their populations.
Affordability is not a problem solved once and for all, but a situation that requires constant monitoring as well as management. Over several decades, Professor Phang Sock Yong’s research at Singapore Management University (SMU) in housing affordability has helped make that task of maintenance clearer in its difficulties as well as practical in the possible solutions available.
In particular, it answers the question of how housing affordability relies on the coordination of land, supply, finance and infrastructure; how rules matter as much as subsidies; how the political economy of housing wealth complicates every reform; and how cities can fund affordability without leaning only on taxes on labour and capital.
It is important to note that, as with many other policies, housing policy does not usually move through one clean causal chain. Influence is most visible where ideas actually travel—government knowledge products, advisory channels, multilateral policy forums and overseas reform debates—shaping how policymakers define the problem, what tools they treat as legitimate and how they test what might translate to their own context.
