Fallen through the technicality cracks

I have always maintained that homelessness in Singapore is a policy issue; no one in his right mind would choose to stay homeless if there is an alternative. This is why policies that do more harm than good to those who are already helpless should be examined and tweaked.

Fine-tuning policies should always be an onging, never-ending process. Instead, we have let inadequate policies compromise the stability and quality of life of Singaporean families, punishing them disproportionately for mistakes that anyone could make, long after they've been made.

Over the last twenty years that Zia and her ex-husband were together, they bought and sold four flats. The first two bought directly from the HDB were a four-room and then a five-room. The third and fourth were four-room flats from the open market. The last one was sold because of their separation. She tells The Online Citizen (TOC) that she did not receive any proceeds from the sale of her flats from her husband.

Following the divorce, she and her five children lived with her mother for more than three years, until her mother decided to sell the three-room flat at the end of 2008.

Zia then applied for HDB’s Public Rental Scheme as the eligibility conditions seemed to apply to her. She is a Singapore Citizen. She earns less than $1500 per month. Her children are legally under her custody. Her last flat was sold more than 30 months ago. And she does not currently “own nor have an interest in any property”, as stipulated by the HDB’s rules.

However, her application was flatly rejected –  because she failed to meet one condition. According to the list of criteria, applicants of the scheme face debarment if they had previously owned and sold two or more direct-purchased flats from the HDB. She is now permanently disqualified.

In other words, a woman who made the "mistake" of a divorce years ago, and who is trying so hard to provide for her children, is being penalised because of the failure of housing policies to treat people like humans, or take into account that situations change and even the rich can fall on hard times.

Kirsten Han takes a detailed look at the Public Rental scheme and finds that "people need to fit into policies rather than policies fitting the needs of the people", and none of us should find acceptable.

Because there are no official studies or statistics we cannot know for sure how many people in Singapore are homeless simply because they are “inbetweeners”: not destitute enough to get the little help that is available, but not rich enough to help themselves.

I do not blame HDB for this, aside from their less-than-empathetic approach; after all they are just enforcing the rules, crafted from policies that are decided by the government. But for our PAP ministers who say that homelessness is a personal responsibility issue, or that some choose to be homeless, is an insult to citizens like Zia. She wants a flat, she is just disqualified because she has fallen through a technicality crack.

What they need is a helping hand, not a free gift, and that helping hand could just be as easy as fine-tuning existing policies to close off such loopholes. Which is what the government should be doing anyway. This egregious dereliction of responsibility is nothing short of appalling.