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Affordable public housing and intergenerational mobility

Nature Cities (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

Using the large-scale public housing program in Singapore as a quasi-natural experiment, we demonstrate that affordable public housing enhances intergenerational mobility for families of lower socioeconomic status. By matching 147,560 parent–child pairs with their housing transaction prices in 1995–2018, we identify three intergenerational mobility patterns in housing consumption: upward mobility among children from families in the bottom 50 percentile ranks, high persistence among children born to parents in the top 20 housing ranks, and downward mobility among the rest. We use the public housing supply shock to construct a difference-in-differences strategy, finding that children whose parents benefited from the affordable public housing program have a 9.5% higher likelihood of surpassing their parents in terms of housing status. Our results provide insight into a new pathway to enhance intergenerational mobility through an affordable housing program, which alleviates housing consumption budget constraints and enables parents to invest more in children’s human capital.

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Fig. 1: Joint density of housing consumption ranks of parents and children.
Fig. 2: Correlation between intergenerational rank–rank coefficient and proportion of public housing at subzone level.

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Data availability

Private housing transaction data are available upon subscription from the REALIS website (https://eservice.ura.gov.sg/reis/index). Public housing transaction data are available on the government website (https://data.gov.sg). A proprietary data vendor has provided the residential data, and the credit and debit card consumption data have been provided by one of the largest banks in Singapore. Due to data-sharing restrictions, we are unable to distribute them. However, upon request, with the necessary nondisclosure agreements signed with the National University of Singapore (NUS), the dataset is available on-site at NUS for replication of all the results.

Code availability

The Stata code used for data analysis in this study is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17733317 (ref. 49).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the seminar participants at the National University of Singapore, Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research (ABFER) Annual Meeting and other conferences where we presented this study. S.A. and Y.F. acknowledge financial support from Singapore MOE SSRTG No. R-311-000-030-119. This Article was previously circulated with the title ‘Like father like son? Social engineering and intergenerational mobility in housing consumption’.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Finance and Department of Real Estate, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Sumit Agarwal & Wenlan Qian  (钱文澜)

  2. Department of Real Estate, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Yi Fan  (樊漪) & Tien Foo Sing  (程天富)

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  1. Sumit Agarwal
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  2. Yi Fan  (樊漪)
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  3. Wenlan Qian  (钱文澜)
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  4. Tien Foo Sing  (程天富)
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Contributions

S.A., Y.F., W.Q. and T.F.S. conceived the research question. S.A. and T.F.S. contributed to the data curation. Y.F. and W.Q. performed the data analysis. Y.F. wrote the first draft. Y.F. and T.F.S. rewrote the paper. S.A., Y.F., W.Q. and T.F.S. contributed to the refinement, interpretation and discussion of the analysis.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yi Fan  (樊漪).

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Cities thanks George Galster, Michael Lens, Angran Li and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Child’s Housing Rank versus Parents’ Housing Rank.

The x axis shows the percentile ranks of parents’ housing consumption, from 0 to 100. On the y axis, we calculate the mean of children’s housing consumption ranks, corresponding to the parents.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Probability of Child’s Housing Rank Exceeding Parents’ Housing Rank by Home Purchase Year of Parents.

The blue solid line plots this probability by parents’ home purchase year for children growing up in public housing estates, whereas the red dashed line plots the corresponding probability for children raised in private housing estates.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Distribution of 1,000 DiD Coefficients by Randomizing BTO Timing.

It shows the Kernel density distribution of estimated coefficients from permutation placebo test.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Distribution of P-values of 1,000 DiD Coefficients by Randomizing BTO Timing.

The dotted horizontal line indicates the 5% p-value.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Event Study on the Effect of Public Housing on Educational Expenditure.

The sample is restricted to married homeowners between 25 and 55 years old, with monthly education consumption between 10 and 1,000 SGD, as defined both broadly and narrowly. The educational expenditure is narrowly defined. Data are presented as mean values ± SEM. The confidence interval is defined at the 95% level. A sample of 63,239 observations is used to derive the statistics in this graph.

Extended Data Table 1 Robustness Check: DiD Estimates on the Impact of BTO Launching on Upward Mobility of Children
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Sub-Sample Analysis: DiD Estimates on the Impact of BTO Launching on Upward Mobility of Children
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–11, Figs. 1–8 and Discussions.

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Agarwal, S., Fan, Y., Qian, W. et al. Affordable public housing and intergenerational mobility. Nat Cities (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00375-y

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