ST : Growing up with the HDB

Nov 13, 2010

Growing up with the HDB

By Warren Fernandez, For The Straits Times

MY EARLIEST memories of home begin with the HDB.

Most of my recollections of carefree childhood days are framed around a small three-room flat in Block 34, Toa Payoh Lorong 5. My family moved in soon after the block was built by the Housing Board in the early 1970s. It was one of those slab blocks with a long corridor, common in those 'rush-to-build' days. Most people kept their front doors open through the day, allowing the gentle breezes to flow through their homes. Neighbours would walk by and often stop to say 'hi'.

My family got along well with our Chinese, Malay and Indian neighbours. Families would often help one another out in simple ways, including occasionally minding each other's children. At festive times, there would be much exchanging of curries and kueh, sometimes gifts and hongbao.

These memories have informed my study of the HDB's work over the years, captured in a book, Our Homes: 50 years Of Housing A Nation. President S R Nathan will launch the book tonight, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Board's founding on Feb 1, 1960. The milestone is doubly significant since the HDB is expected to hand over the keys to its one millionth flat soon.

My memories of growing up in an HDB estate are happy ones - including accompanying my Chinese friends to Mandarin movies, like Agnes Chen tear-jerkers and Bruce Lee action flicks, at the new, air-conditioned Kong Chian cinema in the town centre. I joined boys of all races in many a football game played in a field at the foot of the block, in the void decks, along the corridors, or just about anywhere we could find.

I was too young to realise it then but this easy mixing of residents of different racial and social backgrounds had been deliberately put into effect by the nation's leaders to ensure ethnic integration, right from the beginning of HDB housing estates in the 1960s. We were the living consequences of these good intentions. Wittingly or otherwise, the formative years for many Singaporeans would become inextricably linked to those of the HDB.

The early years of the HDB saw rapid-fire building to tackle the housing backlog and provide much-needed shelter for the growing population. Many doubted the HDB was up to the task, which its predecessor, the Singapore Improvement Trust, had struggled with. Led by pragmatic men like the late Lim Kim San, however, the HDB decided to build simple flats - quickly and cheaply - to meet the people's needs.

By the 1970s, as more blocks began to rise from the ground, HDB leaders began to speak of 'breaking the back of the housing shortage'. They turned their attention to envisioning new towns, such as Toa Payoh. Swamps and squatters would have to be cleared, land acquired and villagers resettled, in a wrenching process of change.

Noting this in an interview for the book, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said: 'Looking back, it looks so natural or inevitable, this sprouting up of housing estates all over Singapore. But each step along the way, from the clearing of squatters, the acquisition of the land, the building and so on, entailed much effort. In some cases, the unhappiness over resettlement remained for years, maybe never went away entirely.'

The 1980s was the 'upgrade' decade. With rising affluence came a desire for bigger homes with better finishings. The HDB was pressed to respond, with political pressures mounting, not only for new homes - and faster! - but also for residents to have more say in shaping their neighbourhoods. Town councils were introduced in the late 1980s to enable just that.

More attention was also paid to niceties, such as design, and giving each estate and precinct a look and feel of its own. Explaining this, former national development minister S. Dhanabalan said: 'One of the secrets of HDB housing was that the same design was repeated again and again, all over Singapore. So much so, that it used to be said that a contractor could go to the site and ask how many storeys, how many flats, and quote on the spot because he knew exactly what the cost was.

'We were worried that if this continued, then all HDB estates would end up looking the same, very uniform, all over the island. That would be horrible.'

The 'upgrading' trend would continue into the 1990s, but this time going wholesale, with the HDB unveiling its multibillion-dollar upgrading programme. The aim was to gradually bring the older HDB estates up to the standards of newer ones like Bishan. The programme proved politically popular - and controversial - and would be extended over the years, through a bewildering alphabet soup of programmes, from the main upgrading to the interim upgrading and the lift upgrading schemes.

I experienced this drama unfolding when, in the mid-1980s, my family 'upgraded' to a five-room executive flat in Yishun, then a brand new town. More than a decade later, however, I was filled with a sweet-and-sour mix of anticipation and nostalgia as I listened to Prime Minister Lee unveil, during his 2007 National Day Rally Speech, plans to remake 'middle-aged' HDB towns such as Yishun. The Northpoint mall and Golden Village cinemas, among the first HDB town centres to be built by private architects, and where I had courted my wife over many movies and hawker centre meals, would be transformed, just as had happened to my old haunts in Toa Payoh.

Today, the old 11-storey block in Toa Payoh where we lived has a new facade and lifts that stop on every floor. It is dwarfed by new 40-storey ones which replaced several old, rental blocks of one-room flats nearby. I recall only too well the dank and dark corridors of those blocks, and the crammed quarters my friends used to live in. So I am glad that they have become just pictures on a page of books on the story of public housing, their residents, hopefully, having moved up in life.

Over the years, the HDB has become so much a part of the lives of Singaporeans and Singapore that it is difficult to imagine what the country would be like without it. As Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew put it in an interview, without the HDB and its home ownership scheme, 'Singapore could not have been as politically stable as it has been. The disparities between the property owners and the non-property owners would have led to great antagonisms and governments would have been voted out.

'Here, they have got something valuable, and if you change a good government for a dud one, and economic growth slows, confidence flows out, your properties would go down in price.'

Put simply, the HDB has become a cornerstone in the building of modern Singapore. Without it, politics, race relations, and the physical face of Singapore would have turned out very differently.

The writer, a former journalist, is a global manager for Shell, leading a team looking at the future of the energy industry.

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