The IGSC - Sunway Institute for Global Strategy and Competitiveness, together with the School of Mathematical Sciences, Sunway University, hosted the first virtual Southeast Asia Housing Symposium on 18 August 2022. This symposium was also a joint collaboration with Associate Professor Tu Yong from the National University of Singapore.

The Symposium was organised to look into the issues of housing affordability specifically in the Southeast Asian region. It aimed to look at what housing affordability is, how it should be defined, and how the housing crisis may be mitigated. The Symposium brought together Southeast Asian stakeholders from the industry, academia, policymakers, and the general public to address the matter from different vantage points.

The invited Keynote Speakers, Dr Lee Hong Soo (Senior Urban Specialist, Asian Development Bank) and Mardi Mapa-Suplido (CEO, Habitat for Humanity Philippines), shared how their respective organisations have assisted many families around the Southeast Asian nations to own adequate and affordable housing. Both keynotes showed how housing solutions should not be solely the responsibility of the government, but that a P4 approach (public-private-people-partnership) would be the way forward in solving the housing conundrum. 

The Symposium also saw a total of 6 invited speaker sessions, both from the industry and academia, to provide different perspectives on housing affordability. Dr Foo Chee Hung (MKH Berhad & REHDA Selangor), in particular, challenged the relevance of the widely adopted median multiple approaches used in Malaysia to measure housing affordability. Similarly, Associate Professor Dr Jason Ng (Sunway University) proposed a new approach to measuring housing affordability, one that is centred on how people assess and perceive their affordability situations to be. Associate Professor Tu Yong (National University of Singapore) and Dr Majo George (RMIT Vietnam) shared how contextual factors could influence the pricing of houses in Singapore and Vietnam, respectively. Associate Professor Dr Poon Wai Ching (Universiti Teknologi Petronas) presented her findings on rental affordability, an under-researched area in the housing literature. Using empirical evidence, she showed that rental differentials across the ethnic groups in Malaysia are not due to racial discrimination by the landlords, but due to economic profitability. 

The Symposium also saw a high-level panel discussion on Malaysian housing affordability by four distinguished guests representing the industry, academia, policymakers, and the general public: Tan Sri Datuk Eddy Chen Lok Lio (REHDA Institute), Dr Tricia Yeoh (CEO, Institute for Democratic and Economic Affairs (IDEAS)), Dr Consilz Tan (Xiamen University Malaysia & Centre for Market of Education), and Mr Sean Tan (@iherng, YouTube Property Reviewer and Influencer). The session was moderated by Professor Pervaiz Ahmed, Director of IGSC.

The panel discussion began with each speaker sharing his/her views on the state of affordable housing in Malaysia, and it quickly escalated into a robust discussion of the failings of the current system that was meant to shelter low-income groups. There was also a relatively shocking exposé on how individuals were able to buy numerous units of low-cost housing that were meant for the poor. It is against this backdrop that one of the panelists argued that low-cost housing should be a government asset used as transit homes for the ultra-poor, and not opened up to the market. On the issue of the overhang of properties, there was a debate about whether a vacancy tax should be imposed to curb the demand for investment housing. Finally, the panel speakers concluded with how they think the housing crisis could be solved, ranging from the creation of a housing database to ramping up the rent-to-own schemes. 

The one-day virtual Symposium saw an online attendance of about 80 participants and the organising committee is looking forward to hosting a physical symposium in 2023 at Sunway University. 

Associate Professor Dr Jason Ng Wei Jian   
School of Mathematical Sciences
Email: @email

This article was first published on LinkedIn, 24 August 2022.