The Avid Ambler: My Adventures in Southeast Asia: Thursday the 24th, Part I: HDB Headquarters

On Thursday the 24th, we went to the Housing Development Board central office. The Housing Development Board (I can't remember if I've explained this before or not - if it sounds familiar, just skip to the next paragraph) is a branch of the government and has enacted perhaps THE most effective public housing scheme in the world. Something like 80% of Singaporeans live in HDB housing, and Singapore provides more housing for its people than any other country in the world.

That being said, it is a government department, and it does its deal of dirty work. From firm and uncompromising land acquisition rights to its "pro-family" policy (you can't buy a government flat before the age of 35 unless you're married) - which is pretty clearly a terrible way of running things, as it doesn't allow friends to live together, discriminates against homosexuals, and often pushes young people into marriages they aren't ready for - to its "Big Brother" methods of dealing with poor people (they're allowed to buy highly subsidized housing, but at a certain level of subsidization, they are highly monitored and checked up on by the government), one cannot blindly go around only talking about how "effective and wonderful" it is.

And yet, it really has worked wonders for this island. Look at pictures (unfortunately, I don't have any, but part of the HDB center was a museum with a series of exhibits that did show the evolution of Singaporean living conditions) of what Singapore looked like before the HDB (and this was as late as 1950s/60s), and you can hardly even fathom such rapid and thorough change as has taken place. Pre-1960s living conditions were appalling - people lived in shacks, had no electricity or running water, threw their waste out in the streets and in the same rivers they bathed in, had leaky roofs and drafty homes. Fast-forward to today, just 50 years later, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone living in these conditions.

Part of the HDB's success, of course, comes from Singapore's size. It's a lot easier to run such a program effectively when you're a small country. Even homes for the disadvantaged (homeless shelters), like the ones we volunteered at on Saturday and Sunday the 26th and 27th (to be discussed in an upcoming blog post), are much easier to run in a small country, where things are easier to regulate and manage. Of course, one obvious downside, as I've already pointed out, is that it also makes it much easier for the government to control things whenever and however it wants.

Anyway, you're probably tired of hearing political jargon. I didn't bring my camera to the HDB place, but I've stolen a few pictures from other people in the group. As I said, the place was set up kind of like a museum, with the information I've shared above (though in much more propagandized terms) and lots of biased videos and interactive computer programs. It was actually really neat, if you filtered out the propaganda - there were big computer screens where you could look at maps and choose which housing development you wanted to learn about, and other ones that told about future development plans. The neatest part was the show flats. The HDB apparently has a few pre-set flat layouts that vary based on number of bedrooms: 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-bedroom. Most of the pictures I'm stealing are of some of the interiors of these show flats.

Honestly, all of us in the group thought they were pretty nice and neat. Many Singaporeans I've talked to, though, feel that they're "quite small" and cramped.

Here was a neat screen where you rolled the screen across a picture, and the screen also showed you a computerized version of the picture. Then, when you got to a certain point, the screen started playing a video based on what picture you were over. So when you crossed a picture of, for instance, Toa Payoh Housing Community, the corresponding video would start playing. Super neat!