Recently, I was told about a programme by the Government of Ireland that pays around US$90,000 (S$115,632) for you to move to an island. The policy, called ‘Our Living Islands’ doesn’t actually pay you to move there. They’re giving you the money to refurbish an existing home if you relocate to one of the rural island communities.
As always with these sorts of programs, there are eligibility requirements and strings attached. The money is strictly for buying and refurbishing a vacant or derelict home on a qualifying island which has no bridge or causeway connecting it to the mainland.
The Irish government says that there are about 30 islands off the coast of Ireland that are cut off daily by the tide, but still have permanent year-round populations and are not in private ownership. This probably explains why these rural island communities have several vacant or derelict houses.
The house has to have been vacant for two years and built before 1993. The US$90,000 is for houses in the worst state of dereliction. You can’t use it as a holiday home or rent it out, there’s a clawback if you sell it, and you must already have residency, among other conditions of the repopulation policy.
Nonetheless, it parallels other government programs around the world that aim to incentivise people to move into certain areas. For example, we’ve seen similar policies introduced in Japan and Italy. Whenever a programme like this comes up, it tends to spark coffeeshop talk about how property prices are crazy in Singapore, and how in bigger countries there are often at least “cheaper” places to run to.
Time and again, Singaporeans will bring up home sizes or land scarcity as among the biggest challenges faced by the housing market here. But if we scrutinise it more closely, these “cheap home” programmes should be telling us a completely different story.
What those examples show isn’t that bigger countries typically result in fewer housing issues. Rather, it replaces the land scarcity issue with another problem, namely accessibility and livability.
Ireland’s islands have land for communities to grow. Japan’s countryside has land primed for redevelopment. Italy’s hill towns could accommodate larger populations as well. What the rural governments in these countries struggle with isn’t raw square footage but accessibility. These areas are usually so far from central urban areas that there aren’t enough jobs (or at least, not enough jobs that pay well enough), and a severe lack of facilities – sometimes to the point where any cost savings are more than balanced out by transport costs, or the costs of bringing in needed supplies. It’s also nigh-impossible for certain family situations, such as seniors who need nearby healthcare, or children who need school access.
And this problem doesn’t only show up between cities or countries. It appears even within very large cities.
Take Los Angeles, often held up as the archetype of a sprawling urban metropolis with a large land area. On paper, LA has everything we often claim Singapore lacks, like a vast land area, low-rise neighbourhoods, and the ability to just keep expanding outward.
Yet affordability and livability remain persistent problems. Urban sprawl becomes an issue when most jobs are scattered, commutes are long and unpredictable, and public transport coverage is a heavy burden on taxpayers.
My point here is that space alone is not the be-all and end-all of Singapore’s housing challenges.
It’s the reason we can’t solely rely on, for instance, reclaiming more land, or try to incentivise a bunch of people to go live on Kusu island or something. Without equal and convenient access to jobs, healthcare, and schools, having cheaper outskirts is not a real solution. Instead, they’re just trade-offs that certain people can afford.
