Housing the People: An Interview with Dr Loh Kah Seng

Episode 34: Housing the People: An Interview with Dr Loh Kah Seng

"Not all the social groups in a society respond the same way as the official narrative would state. So for example, the much lauded Singapore story’s narrative about our move from kampung housing or slums and squatter areas into public housing, which is supposed to be the modern form of housing. Superior, clean - was was not true for people. One of the things I found actually was that for many of the people who first moved into one room emergency flats build by the HDB and SIT in the 50s or 60s, those housing was not very different from living in the slum area in Chinatown, or a squatter area in a kampung the margins of the city...

There wasn't enough state intervention and support given to the kampungs, that's why they continue to burn. That's why we see Bukit Ho Swee happen. Whereas a lot of the state resources were given to not making the kampungs, safe or sanitary, but basically the British colonial government wanted to get rid of the kampungs in the city area, and much more effort and resource was given to building what the British considered low cost flats. They were being built by the Singapore improvement Trust for the working class population [like in Tiong Bahru]. And these were never working class, low cost housing - only in the eyes of the British...

‘One common lament of Singaporeans, older Singaporeans is how we’ve lost this kampung spirit. But it suggests that the kampung spirit also developed because of an absence of the state in that because there was no state intervention in critical areas because we had to do things on our own therefore we develop this local spirit of people having to look out for each other. So it seems to me that when people lament the compound spirit they’re also lamenting a certain loss of autonomy’...

When the kampung dwellers or fire victims move into public housing on a permanent basis, they begin to adopt a way of life, which is drastically different from what they had done before. So for example, pigs and wooden toilets were no longer possible. And this also meant that it had an economic impact. Rent had to be paid in the flats on a regular basis. So you can't just wait for part time employment, or casual employment, in order to pay the rent. It had to be paid, and the HDB was going to press you to pay the rent every month. And subsequent to that, from 1968 onwards, when the government began to allow the use of CPF savings to pay for the ownership, the purchase of HDB flats it also became important therefore, to have a full time permanent job in order to continuously contribute to the CPF and pay for the purchase of the flat over long term installments.

So from that perspective, the CPF and coupled with the public housing project was immensely successful in changing how people looked at their life and the importance of work… buying a flat is one of the rituals that most Singaporeans go through which is very different from the past when Singaporeans basically do not care very much about the kind of housing they were living in as long as it was large enough for their family, or as long as it was relatively close to their workplace or to their family and friends...

‘This is a sort of an inflection point where before this… Singaporeans could live off the land in a almost autonomous fashion. They didn't have to be participants in the economy, in the state, they could have pigs, they could grow vegetables, but once you get into HDB housing, it's not just the flat, but it's a whole different lifestyle that comes with it. You have to take part in the modern economy, you have to be plugged into, you know, rent payment, tax payments, and you have to, you know, you can't have any sort of independence from the state. So that's what you meant by squatters to citizens’"