A ROOF OVER EVERY HEAD

After fifty years of building public housing for its people, Singapore is creating smart eco-friendly designer enclaves, blurring the line between public uniformity and private exclusivity.

Pinnacle@Duxton built in 2009, one of the crowning glories of Singapore’s public housing projects.

I pressed the button to travel to the 26th floor. I could not get to the sky-bridge on the 50th floor because Covid-19 had imposed restrictions on public access. So I rode the lift to the halfway point where, I discovered, the door that let out to the sky-bridge was locked except to those with access. I knew there was a recreation center, an outdoor gym, a children’s playground, a community plaza and two viewing decks on what was the longest sky garden ever built on skyscrapers, measuring a third of a mile each. Through the transom window, I caught a sliver of sunshine and a slanted view of the sky-bridge. A man was jogging on a running track that spanned seven identical buildings propped up like Marlboro cigarette boxes (in white and gray) at equal distances, two sky-bridges linking them all into one whole unit. If my partial view from above was dizzying, the full view from below was equally eye-popping.  

Completed in 2009, Pinnacle@Duxton is the nation’s first 50-story public housing project and has been featured the world over in documentaries, including in a series by Discovery Channel's "How we invented the World: Skyscrapers". At over a million dollars a pop, this award-winning public housing option is not within reach for every aspirant but it showcases the level of achievement in architecture and design by Singapore's public housing authority, The Housing & Development Board (HDB).  At Pinnacle, anyone can troop up the stairs leading from its historic location at 1, Cantonment Road, into the gardens, saunter past the basketball court and step into the elevators.

Public housing in Singapore—gleaming towers with numbers painted on them in big bold colors—is enmeshed into the landscape of this country, like the pink bougainvillea adorning the overhead bridges on the roads. It’s impossible to miss the Lego-like uniform blocks stacked up all around town as I hop in and out of local buses. I’m struck by their variety in design, color and style. None of these, I learned, sprouted in a haphazard fashion.   

The earliest initiatives began as an urgent need to house people. By the time World War II ended, Singapore had been ravaged by bombing and by Japanese occupation for three years. Through the 50s and 60s, the country roiled in an opium habit, race riots, gangsterism and thuggery and the country’s population soared exponentially. Over a million people lived in shanties and slums thronging the Singapore river. The living conditions of penurious coolies who worked at the harbor—some shared the smallest tenements between them while also sharing beds and day clothes—inspired Singapore’s then young prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew of the People’s Action Party (PAP), to make basic housing a priority.

In 1960, a wealthy English-educated Straits Chinese technocrat called Lim Kim San was appointed  the fearless captain of the PAP’s housing development program. Under his direction, the housing board set out a five year building program. 51031 homes had to be built by 1965. Despite challenges—one included a fire in a squatter colony that flattened the homes of 16000 people—52748 flats were built in five years, exceeding expectations. In 1964, the HDB was believed to be building one flat every 45 minutes.

These art deco era developments at Tiong Bahru are a heritage site in Singapore. The development dates back to 1936.

One of the earliest challenges to this initiative was finding land, the consolidation of which was an arduous process as the country was a mass burial ground with several hundred grave sites scattered about town. Cabinet minister Lim Kim San’s quick wit seemed to have saved many difficult moments in Singapore’s transition from a country of fishing communities, river settlements, swamps and kampongs (villages) to a modern city. Lim Kim San was contacted by people whose parents’ graves had to be moved. He asked them one question that also housed the answer within it: “Do you want me to look after our dead grandparents or do you want me to look after your grandchildren?”  

The first HDB homes were small and spartan, one room flat rentals, at $20 each, built to bring poor people—who had never known basic amenities—homes with a private bathroom, toilet and kitchen. A few years later, the government offered the ownership of homes as an alternative, offering subsidies. In its next phase in 1968, the government considered tying savings to home ownership; the Central Provident Fund (CPF) from one’s job could be used to pay the monthly mortgage. By the late 70s, Singapore’s housing famine was thus eradicated. Incrementally, the HDB also built medium and larger flats (up to five rooms) in the same enclave to allow people of different ranges of income to enjoy community living. Today, eighty percent of Singaporeans live in public housing; ninety percent of them own their properties.

The latest HDB townships offer smart living. New housing projects are being built with waterways, car-free town centers, bike trails and green corridors. I visited Singapore’s HDB hub at a township called Toa Payoh where I walked through the public housing of the future. In an island nation that’s worried about the import of climate change on its survival, the next avatar of public housing will need to factor in water management and waste disposal for a sustainable future.

A recent HDB project at Punggol with a waterway through buildings. If you walk for about twenty minutes you reach a trail by Serangoon River which then leads you to Coney Island by which time you may be pretty exhausted:-)

While all Singaporeans admire their country’s avant-garde public housing initiatives, twenty percent of them have opted to live in private condominiums or sprawling leafy bungalows. Having visited a range of private and public housing in the last few months, I see that private housing does offer more personality—both inside the living space and outside on the grounds. A security guard is also a fixture in such complexes even though the country seems to have some of the lowest crime rate in the world.

There are other advantages to private housing, too. Friends can opt to live in the same building complex. That flexibility is lacking in the public system. The allocation of an HDB flat is dependent on several factors; what Americans may call “racial profiling” is considered to be hugely relevant information in Singapore. The approximate ethnic breakdown of the country must be reflected also in the apartment blocks in public housing. When someone sells his home, the same rules apply. The new occupant has to meet the requirements not just for the income level but also with respect to his ethnic background. This, according to many friends I spoke to, is Singapore’s way of preventing ghettoization. It’s a smart strategy; after all, ghettos are breeding grounds for resentment. By putting people of different kinds together, the country is reckoning with the fact that peace itself is a fragile thing. When neighbors of different backgrounds cross each other in the stairwell or the lift every day, they begin to see themselves in others. This acknowledgement of race—and the government’s perceived solution for communal harmony—is one of the most intriguing aspects of life in this town.

An Indian gentleman—I will call him Ram—whose neighbors are three Chinese and one Malay told me how public housing had paid off for his family of four. When he calculated how much he was setting aside monthly for his private condominium, he figured that the $2000 he was setting aside monthly as rent for his condo could be put to better use when the money for his HDB mortgage was taken out of his CPF. Owning an HDB became a practical choice for him; he saved the rental money that he badly needed for his young family. Belonging to an HDB complex offered his family many more community facilities: A recreation center, community play area, huge pools, sports courts, reception halls, hockey, basketball court and a car park. For Ram, life in an HDB has brought peace of mind; if he were to lose his job tomorrow, he has enough money accumulated in his CPF account that his home ownership is secure. Moreover, the housing board would have his back since it also had many programs to care for those in straightened circumstances.

A story I read in The Straits Times opened my eyes to how, like Ram, many Singaporeans had moved into an HDB and worked their way up through the system. For one young woman, her investment in the Pinnacle@Duxton paid off handsomely enough that she could take her profits and stash them into another HDB where she could move in nearer her parents.

Watching the public programs here  in Singapore has been instructive. It has unlaced my own belief systems a little. If something is built thoughtfully and fairly to work for everyone, perhaps the chances are greater that it would work for me, too, one day? If you live long enough in a capitalistic society like I have, you begin to operate under the assumption that everything private is superior to everything public. But whenever I am in the heart of old Singapore, an iconic 50-story marvel looks down at me, needling me to examine my own beliefs, reminding me that the best public project, when designed with forethought and vision, could be at least as good as the bare minimal private project.

The story of Pinnacle@Duxton is also the tale of the success of Singapore’s public housing; it shows how over many decades of creative iterations, style and design can also become yet another aspect of a  public program. Singapore chose to colonize the sky to deliver practical solutions to the public, lifting many families up into the next level of aspiration. How many governments in the world could say that?