Nations are usually born from blood split on the battlefield, but Singapore is a nation nursed from tears.
Singapore, a fledgling city the size of Los Angeles, was kicked out of Malaysia in 1965. Upon hearing this news, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s young and savvy leader, broke into tears at a press conference. With deep sighs and even deeper reservations, Lee and his fellow Singaporeans reluctantly accepted the mantle of independence.
Roughly 55 years later since its independence, Singapore has earned the unique and wholly useless distinction of being my favorite city in the world, which is why I wanted to write an article about the thing I love most about Singapore: its path out of gentrification.
We’ve all seen it before. Artists make a city a cool place to live in. The city’s hip vibes then attract rich yuppies who want to live in a place with people unlike themselves. And by the time all the corporate offices come in, you’re already paying $15 for a lunch salad.
Seattle, San Francisco, Manhattan, and many other cities are in this stage of development where the high cost of living ends up drastically impacting demographics in a city. In these cities, you get a large swath of people between the ages of 23 and 40, renting in the city until they decide to settle down and buy a home elsewhere. You also have the aging homeowners who, by virtue of being born earlier, now own multi-million dollar homes that they bought for pennies on the dollar. And finally, you have the army of service workers who have to commute an hour each way into the city because of the high price of rent.
Sadly, gentrification in America is pretty much a one-way street. Once a city’s gentrified, there’s no way to turn back the clock to affordability.
But Singapore offers a path forward. Like San Francisco, Singapore is a massive commercial hub with a large white-collar workforce that has lots of money to spend. Given the massive amounts of money sloshing through Singapore, you would expect there to be massive upwards pressure on housing, food, and other necessities.
Yet, somehow, a whopping 88% of Singaporean citizens are homeowners.
The underlying theme of Singaporean governance would look like pragmatism to an American. But it’s more than that. In my mind, the roots of Singaporean pragmatism stem from its early fears of being destroyed and swallowed whole. At its inception, Singapore was a tiny country without a real army that had 10% of the population of LA county. To make matters worse, Singapore was surrounded by much larger, relatively unfriendly countries to both its north (Malaysia) and its south (Indonesia). In the early days, Singapore’s survival was not a foregone conclusion.
One of Singapore’s top priorities in the early days was building housing. Given the tiny geographical size of Singapore (1/5th the size of Santa Clara County), Singapore needed to be very intentional about how it would utilize its space.
The government then enacted the most successful public housing program to ever exist on this planet. Today, 88% of Singaporean citizens are homeowners in a world-class city that attracts millions of tourists each year. Here’s how Singapore pulled it off:
Bureaucratic competency: In Singapore, the best and the brightest become government bureaucrats which I suspect has a major impact on the outcomes of government programs.
Build tall: You won’t find an apartment building less than 20 stories in Singapore, which is key to maintaining the affordability of Singapore’s housing. Were people upset about losing their sweet skyline views to these skyrise developments? Maybe, but the Singaporean government certainly didn’t care. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, bureaucrats are rejecting the development of housing complexes that were deemed too tall because they would cast shade over a park.
Build everywhere: Singapore infamously dug up funeral plots and destroyed cemeteries to free up space for their housing developments. When survival is the guiding principle of a nation, you have a much easier time brushing aside people’s sentimentalities.
The underlying theme in the above points is the Singaporean government’s pragmatism. I really think that this pragmatism is rooted in the nation’s gritty beginnings. Singapore is only 55 years old, so a large portion of its population still hears echoes of those harrowing early days through stories directly passed down from their grandparents.
In my opinion, these stories play a very real role in Singaporean public discourse. When fear and survival play such prominent roles in a nation’s collective memory, there’s little room for petty debates around wearing masks or building too tall of an apartment building.
However, it may be the case that this sentiment gets whittled down over time. While Singaporeans today hear of the fear that their grandparents felt in the 1960s, these stories will eventually become something that younger Singaporeans just read from their history books.
Once Singapore’s early history fades away with its older generations, will it be able to maintain its trademark pragmatism?
For Singapore’s sake, I hope so.