In the wake of the Housing Department's announcement of its plan to tighten young singletons' eligibility for public housing, a woman in her early 20s and now living with her family told television news that she had applied to have her own unit because she could not stand living with her parents and siblings.
She did not get much sympathy from editorial comments or callers to phone-in radio shows. The general feeling is supportive of the view advanced by housing officials that young people should not be encouraged to depend on welfare at an early stage of their life. If they want to improve their housing condition, they should try to achieve that by working hard to raise their income.
Most people are shocked to learn that while public housing is meant to help the needy, 3 per cent of single applicants aged below 35 have received tertiary education. Moreover, 3 per cent of the same group is still at school.
What worries officials most is that once an applicant is given public housing, he can virtually enjoy the subsidy forever. This is because the rules make it very difficult to expel well-off tenants.
Ideally, if subsidised housing were delivered both through bricks and mortar, and rental vouchers, and there were more frequent means tests and effective eviction procedures, there would be no need to target singletons. But, as things stand, the discriminatory act of restricting young, single people's right to public housing is the most socially acceptable course of action.
But what if we were to analyse the issue from the perspective of family formation? Housing officials made two interesting observations when they announced their plans. In Singapore, a pro-family policy bars single people aged below 35 from buying public flats. The policy seems to be founded on the assumption that it would force young people to get married in order to enjoy public housing.
In Spain, the government is providing public housing to young singletons as a means of encouraging them to start their own families. The underlying premise seems to be that young people will not get married unless they are given their own flats first.
