RESILIENCE OF MATURE ESTATES IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to study the reasons behind the resilience of Singapore’s mature estates, evaluating the effectiveness of governance behind HDB towns while benchmarking against the private residential market. The study starts out by introducing the filtering-down phenomenon and its consequences that are observable across many old U.S neighbourhoods. In Singapore, the filtering-down trend is less prevalent in the residential markets – be it public or private. The dissertation then focuses on each individual markets, the governance, motivation and mechanisms behind renewal. For the public residential market, filtering-down of mature estates are highly-controlled and we see the resilience of older HDB towns by studying demographics like monthly household, education literacy level as well as HDB median rental statistics of mature and non-mature estates. Results have illustrated that mature estates remain to be highly attractive and relevant today based on the price premium that people are willing to pay over the newer counterparts. The success could be attributed to the effective governance behind the public residential market. The next segment of the study focuses on exploring the filtering-down trends and enbloc as a mechanism for urban rejuvenation in the private residential market. After studying enbloc trends, results showed that freehold sites are generally preferred over leasehold ones in a collective sale and enbloc transactions occur mostly in the Central region. A further detailed cross analysis is done on the Central region transactions to show correlation between monthly household income of population and enbloc trends. Lastly, the study closes by comparing the governance, motivation and mechanisms in both public and private residential markets.