The United States Does For Housing What Singapore Had For Cars

There is a great article in the New York Times about Singapore's policy on cars which makes it prohibitively expensive to own and drive a car. I thought it would be a great interesting to take the article and roughly replace the word 'car' in the article with the word 'housing' and 'Singapore' with 'the United States.' Reading the article with the lens of housing falls into the category of Hubert Humphrey's ad deriding the idea of Spiro Agnew as Vice President as 'it would be funny if weren't so serious.'
The article, titled, Why Driving in Singapore is 'Like Wearing a Rolex, is replete with opportunities to call out the similarities with how we handle housing in the United States. It starts with the headline itself. Why Housing in the United States is 'Like Wearing a Rolex.' Here's a really good language swap from the article. Here's the original paragraph.
'Singapore, an island city-state that is smaller than New York City, charges drivers thousands of dollars just for the right to buy a vehicle. The price of the permits, which were introduced in 1990 to limit pollution and congestion, rises with a car's value.'
Here's my Mad Lib version.
'New York, an island city that is bigger than Singapore, charges people who need housing thousands of dollars just for the right to buy or rent a home. The price of the permits, and zoning which was introduced in 1920s to limit greed and profiteering, rises with a home or apartment's value.'
There's even the hard luck story so common in housing stories in the United States. There's the story of Joy Fang who bought an old Hyundai three years ago for $58,000, 'nearly twice the price the pre-permit price of a new model of that sedan.' Shocking. I'm not even going to link to one of the thousands of stories that highlight how much a person or family is spending on renting a home or buying one.
Here's the Times about Fang's car.
'Each month the couple pays about $1,400, or more than 10 percent of their household budget, for the car, the permit, and other expenses like road taxes, fuel and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.'
Here's my version, doctored up for housing in the United States.
'Each month the couple pays about $4,400, or more than 30 percent of their household budget, for the house, the zoning permits, and other expenses like property taxes, other taxes, and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.'
But here's the big difference between the hassle of owning and driving a car in Singapore and housing in the United States: in Singapore there are substitutes.
Another subject in the Times story says,
'We're not sitting in traffic for two or three hours just to get to work.' The resident of Singapore articulates that 'having an efficient public transport system also makes it easier for Singaporeans to not use a car, and he takes it himself when he needs to go downtown.'
There is no substitute for housing. If a public policy taxes and regulates a commodity to the point that it is far too painful to buy and own it, but offers alternatives, then people will likely give up the commodity. In the case of Singapore, the Times story notes,
'There is little reason for many Singaporeans to own a car. Most residents rely on an expanding and affordable public transportation system that stretches across the island. Even long journeys cost less than 2.50 Singapore dollars, or about $2, and ride-hailing platforms such as Grab are plentiful.'
The substitute for owning a home in the United States is renting, but what is the substitute for renting? There isn't one. When poor people are pressed because housing is too expensive, they're faced with the same challenge Fang describes, cutting back on other necessities or trying to effectively manage limited cash flow.
To me, it is clear, Singapore decided to constrain the ownership and operating of a car for policy reasons – climate change, infrastructure savings etc. – but it also created an off ramp (pun intended) for people to find alternatives to owning and operating a car.
Zoning and other regulations, taxes, fees, and fines for housing in the United States function just like the limits on car ownership in Singapore, except that public policy here has failed to provide any alternatives. Instead, if we follow the analogy, we create limits on owning and renting a home, then we limit the supply of subsidized alternatives with even more regulation making the cost of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing, for example, prohibitive too. Imagine if Singapore did what it has done with cars but limited ridership of public transit, produced very routes, and created waiting lists for a trip. Whatever one thinks of Singapore's policy, applying it to housing through zoning and regulation is misguided at best and at worst, a cruel punishment for people who earn less money.

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Two weeks after the Trump Organization announced the deal, the president himself arrived in Doha as part of his three-country tour of the Middle East. He declared the trip a huge success, having drummed up trillions of dollars of business and investments for the US. *** The Guardian invited the White House to comment on complaints that the president has blurred his public duties with his family's personal profit-making activities to a degree never before seen in the US. A White House spokesperson replied with a statement which they asked us to print in its entirety, so here goes: 'There are no conflicts of interest. President Trump's assets are in a trust managed by his children. It is shameful that the Guardian is ignoring the GOOD deals President Trump has secured for the American people, not for himself, to push a false narrative. President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.' The argument that there is no conflict of interest because Trump's business is handled by his children, specifically his sons – Don Jr leading on crypto and his social media empire, Eric on real estate – is an interesting one. Sons seem to be de rigueur, to the extent that members of Trump's inner circle who lack them might feel the need to borrow one. Take other key figures in Trump's cabinet, which is packed with so many banking and energy billionaires that it ranks as the richest presidential cabinet in modern history. Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who has a personal fortune of about $2.2bn, has been involved in various accusations of conflict of interest since he encouraged Fox News viewers to 'buy Tesla'. At the start of this year Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm Lutnick led for almost four decades, increased its investment in Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin in the world. Cantor's stake rose by several hundred million dollars to $1.3bn, research by the watchdog has found. At the same time, Lutnick was actively helping Trump create his strategic bitcoin reserve, a move that greatly strengthened the cryptocurrency. Last month, Lutnick divested himself of his Cantor stake, but he did so by transferring his ownership to his two sons. Cantor is now controlled by Brandon Lutnick, 27, and Kyle Lutnick, 28. Or take Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine-skeptic health secretary. Under intense pressure from Democratic senators, he agreed to divest his 10% stake in any payout from an ongoing lawsuit in which he is engaged against Merck over its HPV vaccine, Gardasil. Government officials are not allowed under federal law to participate personally in official matters in which they have a financial interest. So what did Kennedy do? He transferred his stake in the case to one of his adult sons. And then there's Mehmet Oz, the multimillionaire physician better known by his TV name, Dr Oz, whom Trump put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. As the Washington Post has reported, Oz co-founded a health benefits company, ZorroRX, that helps hospitals save on prescription drugs. This would have been an indisputable conflict of interest, because in his job as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Oz wields huge sway over hospital drug policies, and thus ZorroRX profits. Since taking up the position Oz, whose wealth is put at up to $300m, has divested himself of some of his investment portfolio and is no longer mentioned on ZorroRX's website. His fellow co-founder of ZorroRX, however, is still listed as the firm's head of medical affairs. That's his son, Oliver Oz. Under federal conflict of interest law, there is no prohibition on adult children managing the interests of parents who hold public office. Yet the spirit of the law does force us to reflect on why so many Trump administration leaders are so fond of handing sensitive money-making portfolios to their sons. 'By giving over to your son, you are immediately raising questions about how separate you are going to be from the success of this business,' said Caputo of the Campaign Legal Center. 'Will you be focused on what's best for the public, or will you be guided in your decision-making by what would most benefit your family?' *** In the last analysis, what matters most perhaps about the financial dealings of the Trump administration is what impact they are having on the American people. In particular, what is it doing to the 77 million voters who put their trust in Trump and sent him back to the Oval Office? Trump returned to the White House partly on his promise to working-class Americans that he would 'drain the swamp', liberating Washington from the bloodsucking of special interests. Yet a review by the Campaign Legal Center found that Trump nominated at least 21 former lobbyists to top positions in his new administration, many of whom are now regulating the very industries on whose behalf they recently advocated. Eight of them, the Campaign Legal Center concluded, would have been banned or restricted in their roles under all previous modern presidencies, including Trump's own first administration. They include Pam Bondi, the US attorney general. She approved the gift of the Qatari luxury jetliner as 'legally permissible', having herself worked as a lobbyist for Qatar. Trump's other great pledge was that he would put the wellbeing of 'forgotten' working people before that of the vested elites. His appeal was pitched at the millions of rural and working-class Americans who have languished from mounting income inequality, the decline of manufacturing jobs in the globalised economy, and what he claimed was the negative effects of millions of undocumented immigrants. Evan Feinman has witnessed personally and up close how this promise has fared in Trump 2.0. For the past three years, Feinman was busy leading a $42.5bn program created by Congress to bring affordable high-speed internet to every American home and business that needed it. The project was vast and ambitious, on a par with the rural electrification drive that transformed the heartlands of America in the 1930s. Located within the US commerce department, its success is critical to the future prosperity of millions of Americans, especially those in hard-bitten rural areas of the sort that solidly backed Trump in the last election. Studies have shown that giving families access to the internet improves the grades of school students, increases college enrolment and reduces the likelihood of households falling into debt. It also helps older Americans stay in their own homes and avoid residential care. By the inauguration, the broadband project was well under way, with several states only weeks away from breaking ground and laying the cables. Then Lutnick took over the reins of the commerce department. Within a days of his confirmation, Lutnick met with senior managers and informed them he wanted to scale back on the use of fibre optic and switch to satellite. According to an account of the meeting that was given to Feinman by someone present, Lutnick specifically inquired after his friend Musk, the CEO of Starlink, which provides internet services through low-Earth orbit satellites. Days after that, Feinman was told he was being let go. His contract was up for renewal, and it wasn't being extended. 'I was dismayed,' Feinman told the Guardian, insisting that his distress was not so much related to his own dismissal but out of concern for the Americans who would be harmed by the shift. By his reckoning, satellite internet would not only be slower than broadband, it would also be much more expensive – costing users an extra $840 a year in fees. 'For Americans in rural locations, that's going to really hurt. Many of the president's strongest supporters – up to hundreds of thousands of families who voted for Trump – are going to see slower, more expensive internet services, and all to the benefit of the wealthiest man on earth.' According to some estimates, Musk's Starlink stands to make $10bn to $20bn should the shift from broadband to satellite internet go ahead. The episode has left Feinman 'deeply saddened. I see my nation harming itself in ways that are inexplicable and entirely avoidable.' He fears for rural Americans who will pay the price. 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