Social Integration and Housing Behaviours of Immigrants: Evidence from Singapore's Public Housing Market

This study investigates the impact of social integration on immigrants' housing behaviours from a temporal perspective, using Singapore's differential public housing policies on immigrants as a quasi-natural experiment. With the support of a local town council, we conducted a survey on social integration among 1,128 immigrant and local households living in public housing estates. In the public open rental housing market - primarily accommodating yet-to-integrate immigrants - we find immigrant renters live up to 3.04% farther from their workplace and pay lower rents up to 0.67% per additional year of residency. Such impacts are more substantial among minority ethnic groups. The results remain robust when using alternative subjective or objective measures of social integration. However, in the public resale housing market - primarily accommodating native and well-integrated naturalised citizens - we find that naturalised citizens face no price premiums relative to native homebuyers, implying no further effect of integration on housing prices after well-integration. This study extends the literature of spatial assimilation focusing on ethnic residential segregations and is generalizable to cities with few ethnic enclaves.