User:Mujinga/DraftSiSing



When what would later become the Republic of Singapore was part of the Straits Settlements, the British colonial government set up the Singapore Improvement Trust in the 1920s in order to improve housing. The Tiong Bahru housing estate was built in this time, displacing squatters. Traditionally, many people lived in kampongs, villages of wooden houses with thatched roofs.

The self-governance of Singapore started in 1959 and the new authorities were faced with the problem of overcrowded slums and squatted informal settlements. The Housing and Development Board (HDB) was founded in 1960 and began an ambitious program of urban renewal which has resulted in most of the population living in housing built by the state. Most people live in apartment blocks, having bought their homes on 99 year leases. Houses were funded in part by the Central Provident Fund and the HDB reported in 2013 that it had housed over 80 per cent of the population in 920,000 apartments, of which 95 per cent were owned and 5 per cent rented.

Liu Thai Ker, who in the course of his career ran both the Housing and Development Board and the Urban Redevelopment Authority, estimated that in 1960 there had been 1.3 million squatters in a country of 1.6 million people. He told the BBC News that Singapore had modernized in just one generation and by 1985, there were "no homeless, no squatters, no poverty ghettos and no ethnic enclaves". The new state concentrated on housing people in slums first and following the Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961 in which four people died and around 16,000 were made homeless, squatters were more receptive to being resettled.