Poser over homes with 99-year lease

MR K.S. RAJAH’S letter, ‘Right to hold property guaranteed by law’ (March 20), rebuts Ms Susan Prior’s comment in an earlier letter, ‘En bloc sales eroding our sense of kampung’ (March 17), that ‘your home is not really your home’.

Mr Rajah’s interpretation that ‘the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property is enshrined in the Constitution…’ may well be correct in the case of properties that are freehold, or even 999-year leasehold. But can the same be said to apply where leases are of only 99-year tenure, straddling barely a couple of generations, as is typical of public housing and many private estates, like the one where I am residing, with a quarter of the lease already run out?

Seen in this latter context, anybody who has made payment on such a leasehold property can be said to have not much more than what used at one time to be known as ’squatting rights’, and would be liable to eviction when the lease expires. In the very early 1950’s, the 100-year lease to the site of where Malayan Banking presently stands in Battery Road was on the point of expiry, and failed to attract a bid when put up for auction owing to the uncertainty of an extension by the authorities. This is the likely scenario when these 99-year leases also wind down. Ms Prior may therefore not be altogether wrong to think, and feel, that ‘your home is not really your home’.

Narayana Narayana