Nick Burns spent years paying for a life he says never quite felt secure, first in downtown San Francisco and then on a commute that ran an hour and a half each way to Silicon Valley. In 2025, he and his wife bought a four-room public housing apartment on the city fringe in Singapore for 1.01 million Singapore dollars, or about $790,000.
The purchase was a way out of a market Burns, 35, came to see as impossible. He said his two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco cost $5,728 a month, plus a $300 reserved parking fee, and that even as a single man he felt unsafe walking around. “But it felt impossible, like a crazy idea,” Burns said of the idea of buying a home. “Even as a single man, I felt unsafe walking around,” he said.
Burns grew up in Connecticut and served in the Navy, where he first visited Singapore and was struck by its clean streets and fast public transport. After leaving the Navy in 2017, he moved to San Francisco for work and later worked in semiconductor manufacturing. He relocated to Singapore with his company in January 2020, and in 2023 he married his wife, who is Singaporean.
That marriage helped make the purchase possible. Burns holds permanent residency in Singapore, and the couple were able to buy an HDB flat because his wife is a citizen. HDB flats are government-built homes that make up the majority of housing in Singapore and are primarily reserved for citizens. The stamp duty and down payment came to about SG$280,150, with the couple paying most of the down payment in cash and about 20% from their CPF, while the rest was financed through a bank loan. Their monthly mortgage is about SG$3,520.
Burns said the contrast with his life in the United States was stark. “I don't want to go back to the United States,” he said. Singapore is often ranked among the world's most expensive cities, and Burns’s story fits a wider pattern of Americans being priced out at home and finding that a different answer exists abroad.