One home, Two families: Understanding poverty in Singapore through an analysis of the Interim Rental Housing (IRH) Policy

Abstract

Singapore’s housing policy has always been a topic of interest, with a successful public housing programme that has 82% of its populace residing within it. Nevertheless, there exists an underclass who are unable to afford such units; A public rental scheme was introduced to assist this group of people to have subsidised accommodation. However, there are people who are still unable to apply for public rental units for various reasons, and the Interin Rental Housing (IRH) scheme was introduced to assist them. There are two key characteristics of the IRH policy: leases are only for one year, and units are shared between two families. Firstly, this paper aims to utilise IRH policy as a lens to understand the state’s epistemology of poverty. Secondly, I will examine how the IRH policy is informed and reinforced at three scales: State, Community and Home. This scalar analysis will allow this paper to look at the effectiveness of the IRH policy and how it is being reinforced and conceptualised by different stakeholders. Lastly, this paper will look at how the understanding of the home-space has changed as a result of this cotenancy aspect of the IRH policy for the residents. This thesis seeks to pull together strands of work from various sub-disciplines of geography: poverty geography, welfare geography and geographies of home. These disparate strands of literature allows this paper to provide an insight into the IRH policy, allowing this paper to scrutinize the state’s conceptualization of poverty and how the policy has affected residents’ understanding of the home-space. With a lack of research done on the effectiveness of IRH policy, it is hoped that this thesis will provide a springboard for future research, on how housing policy fills in a literature gap that is crucial in informing and assisting the impoverished in Singapore.