Jean: Why the Not-So-Rich Being Discriminated?

[makapaaa]

<TABLE border=0 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%"><TBODY><TR>Questions on collective sale laws
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<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->I REFER to last Friday's letter by the Ministry of Law, 'Rights of all owners adequately protected'.
I am particularly troubled by the statement: 'We have taken steps under the Land Titles (Strata) Act to ensure the rights of all owners are adequately protected and provide recourse for those who feel aggrieved for any reason.' For any reason? According to current laws, the Strata Titles Board will consider only financial objections. Non-financial objections are deemed irrelevant. So anyone objecting to a collective property sale for non-financial reasons has no legal recourse.
Also, an objector to a collective sale may be ordered by the Strata Titles Board to pay the legal costs of the majority consenting owners if his objection fails. For an individual, the prospect of having to pay legal costs is intimidating and makes any application to the Strata Titles Board to object to a sale a non-starter.
I also refer to the aim of land use optimisation, said to be the policy consideration behind the collective sale laws. What specifically is meant by 'optimisation' and how is it evaluated? Is it linked to national good, which is more heartfelt and intangible? Or is it to be measured in terms of economic or financial benefits only, and if so, whose?
Are collective sale laws retained because the benefits outweigh or justify the social costs and detrimental effects of the sales? These are - among others - destruction of social communities caused by pitting neighbour against neighbour, demolition of good buildings for commercial profit and emotional distress of losing one's home.
Finally, I am curious why only strata title owners bear the burden of this presumably national-interest public policy. If land use optimisation is the aim, there should be a nationally applied policy by which no property owner (not even owners of good class bungalows) is exempt from having his property compulsorily acquired if he is not optimising the use of the land he owns.
Jeannette Chong Aruldoss (Ms)

 

[makapaaa]

<TABLE border=0 cellSpacing=0 width="100%"><TBODY><TR><TD class=heading>Latest comments</TD></TR><TR><TD id=messageDisplayRegion width="100%"><TABLE style="WIDTH: 100%" cellSpacing=2 cellPadding=0><TBODY><TR><TD style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: top" align=left><TABLE style="WIDTH: 100%" cellSpacing=2 cellPadding=0><TBODY><TR><TD style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: top" align=left><TABLE style="WIDTH: 100%" class=Post cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0><TBODY><TR><TD style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: top" align=left>Hear! Hear! Indeed, the Ministry's response is highly flawed. It is double standards if homeowners of freehold strata are forced to en-bloc for some "national good", but not those of Good Sized Bungalows, presumably because we dare not ruffle the feathers of the upper-society people who live there?

Where is the protection for the minority if legal costs are to be borne should their appeal not be successful? Is that not a threat and indirect coercion?

At the end of the day, a country whose wealth is falsely driven by property value inflation through speculation (aka GAMBLING) is a weak economy that will be held hostage by high overheads and no real trade beyond its borders. Do we have many home grown private businesses that are industry leaders globally? What have we to show in that area apart from pandering to and being at the mercy of foreign-owned businesses?
</TD></TR><TR><TD style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: top" align=left>Posted by: readi at Tue Aug 25 08:57:17 SGT 2009
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[FuckSamLeong]

Miss Jean, you are still living in a dream world. Since when had the interests of the public been the priority? 1959? Singapore is a fiefdom owned by the House of Lee!