THE Government should allocate more resources for rental housing, which seems to be in short supply, urged Ms Indranee Rajah (Tanjong Pagar GRC) during yesterday’s Budget debate.
This would alleviate the needs of the lower-income group and the elderly.She said: ‘They don’t have the money to buy a house, their only option is rental housing and they can’t afford to rent private property .’
Ms Indranee referred to the trickle-down effect of rising rents, starting with the higher-end properties .
She said: ‘You have this effect where slowly, people are pushed out, and it goes all the way down along the line until you get to the person who has nowhere else to go except an HDB rental flat.”
Ms Indranee recounted two incidents of residents asking her for help.
She said: ‘I had one resident approaching me for a rental flat because he has been living in a bin centre.
‘He didn’t have a roof over his head, he was staying in that open area where the dustbins were; he had nowhere else to go.’
Another case involved a family whose members had to live apart because they could not get a rental home.
She recalled: ‘One child was with one relative, another child was with another relative, and they said sometimes they went to the beach to stay.’
Ms Indranee urged the Government to conduct a comprehensive review of rental housing here, and to analyse supply and demand.
She said: ‘There seems to be an acute shortage of HDB rental housing.
‘The waiting list at the moment seems to be like nearly up to eight to nine months and in some cases nearly a year.’
Ms Indranee also called for the HDB to reconsider the policy of requiring at least two people to live in a rental flat.
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