All hail the landlord

In Singapore, passion has always been a stubbornly persistent force, marketed to death as resilient, defiant, and hopeful. It is, if the nation would have you believe, the quiet optimism of the retiree baking muffins in the heartlands at daybreak, the earnest determination of the young man running an affordable gym at Kallang Wave Mall, or the mother-and-son duo opening a cafe not to make a tidy fortune, but simply to share joy.

Still, allow me candour, please, and without illusion: these were never stories of sustainable enterprise. They were ghost stories — tales of a Singapore that had already died, though we pretend and fight tooth and nail to argue otherwise.

Today, passion is precisely what capitalism always intended it to become: quaint, nostalgic, and painfully naive. Something only fools or idealists cling to as the economic machinery of Singapore churns relentlessly forward. Here, in the land of polished skyscrapers and relentless pragmatism, it’s not passion that fuels dreams anymore. It’s capital. And capital is heartless.

The mathematics of annihilation

Consider the brutal numbers that make this reality impossible to deny. In 2024 alone, prime retail rents surged by 3.0 per cent year-on-year, hitting an unforgiving $27.80 per sq ft per month. Just when small businesses dared hope for respite, rents rose another 0.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2025. These incremental percentages, dull and technical on a chart, translate into the shuttered doors of real, beloved places — hundreds per month, according to industry reports. Already over 300 F&B establishments closed every single month in 2025 according to a Reuters report, a sharp escalation from previous years. That’s more than ten businesses a day.

And still we refuse to admit that this is a crisis.

This is capitalism achieving its terminal velocity. Every closure is a triumphant victory for efficient capital allocation. Every shuttered dream cafe is proof that the market is functioning optimally.

Take for instance, Flor Patisserie which faced a staggering 57 per cent rental hike and closed two outlets in 2024, sparking timely outcry on social media about the cruel realities of Singapore’s vicious rental market. Nearby, Parkway Parade Mall bled tenants like Marks & Spencer. Even Michelin-starred restaurants like Art di Daniele Sperindio and Braci buckled under costs. We like to call these tragic losses. But in truth, they are merely the natural conclusion of a system we chose decades ago.

A philosophical death

And perhaps the deepest tragedy lies precisely here: We’ve arrived at what philosophers might call the “capitalist event horizon” — the point beyond which no alternative vision can escape the gravitational pull of pure profit maximisation. Landlords have quietly and insidiously ascended into the ultimate arbiters of our city’s culture and community. They are no longer the service provider — they are the customer, and tenants are their obedient supplicants.

We have built a city where storefronts sit empty, waiting patiently for better-funded tenants, while dreams — authentic, community-centred dreams — die quietly behind shuttered roller gates. Better empty and expensive than affordable and occupied. Better sterile than sincere.

And why shouldn’t they? In a system that rewards maximum profit above all else, empty storefronts represent perfect economic logic.

What we’re witnessing today isn’t an aberration — it’s the logical endpoint of unleashing market forces without restraint. When we decided that all land should be valued at its highest possible economic potential, we made our bed. We declared that the meaning of space is not community, culture, or human connection. It is profit. That’s all.

The end of pretense

Yet perhaps the bitterest pill we must swallow is the realisation that there is no turning back. The soul of our city — the very idea of doing business out of passion, kindness, community — is already lost. The bridge has long since been crossed, burned, and reduced to ashes. We’ve been engaging in collective delusion, imagining we can have both unlimited market freedom and preserved community spaces.

We cannot. Capitalism has won; the dreamers have decisively lost. This is the philosophical reality of our times: capitalism, left unchecked, has no inherent moral compass, no interest in preserving quaint visions or community-driven ideals. It operates on a cold logic of efficiency, growth, and endless accumulation. To survive, you either play by its rules or you disappear. Every policy that prioritises “economic competitiveness” over social values reinforces this trajectory. Every celebration of Singapore’s business-friendly environment is an endorsement of this outcome.

We cannot simultaneously worship at the altar of market efficiency and weep for its casualties.

Still , if one insists upon asking — if one demands solutions — then let’s be candid about what “solutions” might even look like in this landscape of abject ruin. The first, though painful, is a frank acknowledgment of our priorities: If we truly value small businesses, cultural vibrancy, and affordability, we must be willing to legislate aggressively against pure market logic.

Introduce robust rental controls, impose vacancy taxes on landlords who prefer empty storefronts over community-driven tenants, and build a protective framework that actively privileges affordable, passion-driven entrepreneurship over cold profit maximisation.

Second, investors with substantial financial resources (read: deep, deep pockets) must step in — not as profit-seekers, but as guardians of community and culture. This means fostering patient capital that prioritises long-term community value and cultural sustainability over rapid returns. Investors must recognise that preserving diverse, affordable, passion-driven businesses requires financial commitment that is both strategic and morally conscious.

Yet — and this is perhaps the hardest truth — we must also admit that implementing these solutions would demand a cultural reorientation away from the economic pragmatism that has become the nation’s very identity. Do we, as a society, have the stomach for policies that openly favour social good at the expense of profit? Are we prepared to withstand the shrill complaints of capital, the ominous warnings from economists about market distortions, or the bitter political reality of landlords — powerful, vocal, and connected — pushing back at every step?

Unless we possess the collective courage to answer “yes” decisively to each of these questions, all proposed solutions remain performative, little more than lip service to soothe consciences. Otherwise, perhaps it’s more honest to finally drop the pretence, admit defeat, and carry on, silently resigned to capitalism’s unyielding victory.

Accepting the machine

There’s no space for false optimism here. To mourn the loss of passion-driven business is perhaps as futile as it is noble. Even as we weep for the cafés, bakeries, yoga studios, and small shops we have lost, capitalism itself never mourns. It moves relentlessly onward, indifferent, and blind to our grief.

The Singapore of passionate small businesses was transient — a brief, beautiful accident allowed temporarily to thrive. But now it is time to accept reality: that the city we occupy is not a community and it’s certainly not a vibrant ecosystem of ideals and aspirations — it is simply a marketplace, and we are nothing more than its willing participants.

This defeatist perspective is not surrender; rather, it’s an acknowledgement of reality. We chose the path of maximum economic efficiency, and it has led us exactly where such paths lead: to a city optimised for capital rather than culture, for transactions rather than tradition, for profit rather than passion. The young man’s affordable gym, the auntie’s muffin shop, the family cafe — these were anachronisms, holdovers from a pre-capitalist mindset that believed space could serve purposes other than maximum revenue generation. To stand still in lamentation is to be inevitably and cruelly trampled.

Capitalism is a relentless current, and we are far downstream from the point where swimming back was ever possible. All we can do now is float forward in its indifferent wake, mourning privately as we languish past the places where passion once lived and died. This is what we chose. This is what we built and this is who we are now.

When muffins become too expensive to bake cheaply, when gyms can no longer offer community rates, and when only large chains and venture-funded franchises remain, we haven’t merely lost small businesses — we’ve lost something much larger, something fundamentally irreplaceable.

We’ve lost ourselves.