Why so big the HDB mortgage?

I've been watching Clean Sweep on Discovery Home & Health religiously. It's a one-hour show, but because a lot of it is chatter, I forward parts to focus on how they clear (or purge) their clutter, how they accumulate the clutter and what organisation solutions the Clean Sweep team comes up with. Oh btw, the carpenter is hot, in a handy-man sorta way.

The participants are average Americans who live on smaller sub-urban plots of 1,500 to 2,500sqft. houses. Only 2 rooms are tackled in 2 days. One of them had a basement study, half the size of my bedroom.

I try to watch such programmes with my parents, my dad's a hoarder and my mum's a clean freak, minimalist enthusiast who used to have really gaudy taste. Dad has since managed to curb his hoarding tendencies, limited to 2 isolated areas: the storeroom and the telephone coffee table in the living room. I managed to stop Mum from using fake flowers as decoration; they remind me of a columbarium. She also took my advice to use clear plastic on our dining table instead of some flowery/fruity opaque plastic sheet, so we can now appreciate the redwood texture.

Despite the educational and entertaining value of this programme, I get saddened knowing that I can never afford houses like these in Singapore. I mean I'm being realistic here, not that I'm not ambitious. I explained to my mum, even the minimum 3-room (2 bedrooms + 1 hall) HDB flat in "suburban" areas, such as AMK, Bedok and Clementi costs between S$285,000 and S$315,000.

If you know me well enough, you know I dun like debts. And for 1 person, 750-850sqft is a lot of wasted space. But in Singapore, we have policies that dictate you can only buy a minimum 3-room flat. The studio and 2-room (1 bedroom + 1 hall) are only for rental purposes, a form of welfare housing. But in New York, I was extremely green with envy when I watched on Youtube how a woman paid US$700 a month for a 90sqft apartment near Central Park! You can read the original article here.

So given how HDB prices are approaching S$370psf, I can only afford S$50,000 right now. That would get me 135sqft which I can still fit in a mahjong table and 4 chairs. However, we dun have that luxury, not even in private property. Even if I could, that means buying a small piece of land and rebuilding or demolishing part of the house. That would definitely go beyond S$50,000. And mum iz sadface as she listens intently to me for those few minutes.

Here's a somewhat related video of Jay Shafer, of Tumbleweed Houses, on The Politics of Tiny Houses:


We are doomed unless there's a freeing of the market to build smaller, more efficient spaces for less.