Singapore's divisive ethnic-based housing policy by Kontinentalist

Singapore has a unique policy for public housing which stipulates quotas for the maximum number of households that can be allocated to each race. Called the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP), it was introduced in 1989 to prevent the formation of racial enclaves in public housing. Singapore has a majority Chinese population.

For most home buyers and sellers, interaction with the EIP is limited to an online form, where they can check which ethnicities they can transact with. The ethnic proportions data is refreshed monthly; beyond this, the government does not release more granular data on which quotas have been hit, and for which specific blocks or neighbourhoods. Kontinentalist contributor Melissa Zhu filled in the online form for every block in Singapore as a Singaporean seller of each ethnic group in June 2024. With this, we pieced together a more complete picture of how frequently sellers were affected by the EIP, and its price effects. The story first explains how the policy works, such as how one’s pool of buyers can be restricted due to the quotas, and includes anecdotes of the difficulties faced by ethnic minority sellers.

The centrepiece of the story is an interactive map visualisation of Singapore that shows which blocks have been hit by which quotas in June 2024. From this, readers can see the pattern of where quotas were hit—blocks that hit the Chinese quota tended to be in the central areas of the country, while blocks that hit the ethnic minority quota tended to be in the fringes. Readers can also input individual block numbers into the search bar, and see what quotas each block had hit.

The story gave a compelling glimpse into the implications of the policy, and allowed us to share data-led observations that had been obscured because of how data is usually shared by the government. In doing so, the story revealed the difficulties faced by minority ethnicity home owners, and questioned if the policy is still relevant, 35 years on.