Time we had real public housing

At last, we have a party that is urging a true public housing scheme for Singapore. It has long been an embarrassment that we do not have real public housing here.

The policy paper put out recently by the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) (link) is a bold move in this direction. Leading economist Yeoh Lam Keong called it an “excellent” paper on Tuesday, 6 November, when he was giving a talk — more about this later.

Readers may wonder about my opening paragraph. What do I mean when I say we do not have real public housing in Singapore? Doesn’t the fact that some 85 percent of Singaporeans live in Housing and Development Board flats point to its enormous success?

Change we must, by William Lim

Change We Must

William S.W. Lim
12 September 2012

Introduction

This lecture will be in two parts. The first part will highlight four critical issues why Singapore has to change. The second part will focus on the complex challenges ahead.

Part 1

1.0 Four critical issues

There are four critical issues that Singapore must contend with and are the reasons that it must change. They are:

1.1  Interdependent global conditions today.
1.2  Progress of Singapore not enough.
1.3  Myths and realities of Singapore.
1.4  The misunderstood nature of creativity.

Middling going on to transport hell

Our mainstream media has a habit of trumpeting country or city rankings that show Singapore in good light. It’s part of their mission to publicise the supreme achievements of the People’s Action Party government.

This ranking below would not make the cut:

Haircuts, hotels and photo clubs

You reporters are missing the point — was what I felt on seeing that the chief angle of both stories in the Straits Times was how difficult it can be for teachers to maintain discipline in schools if parents did not cooperate. Yes, that’s a valid news angle, but surely the most striking thing about the story was that of a mother who takes her son to a hair salon for $60 styling jobs.

What kind of values does that instill in children?

On Supertrees, neo-colonialism and globalisation

Guest essay by Joanne Leow

Supertrees, green spaces and urban development: strange yet compelling connections between the impending demolition of Bukit Brown and the public relations blitz accompanying the opening of the new Gardens by the Bay, with their $1 billion Supertrees and cooled conservatories. One space has been made significant by a spontaneous, communal outpouring, newly cognizant of both its historical and environmental specificity – the other has been planned by the government, designed by a British firm and built by (exploited) foreign labour on land that has been reclaimed from the sea.

Public trashport

A typical day, with me straphanging in a bus, about one quarter the way in. We pull up at a bus stop, a few people get off and a few people board. The last group to come up the front steps consist of a mother, laden with shopping, and two sons, aged around 12 and 8. The bus driver tells her in mainland-accented Chinese that they shouldn’t board because the two boys each have an ice-cream cone in hand.

The mother starts to make a scene. “They are only children, you cannot be so strict with children,” she says, “and anyway I am in a hurry.”

She adds that they need to get home and can’t afford to wait for the next bus.

Danger zone: home, part 2

A point made by Carl Siciliano, Executive Director of the Ali Forney Center which helps homeless LGBT youth, may be counter-intuitive, but still true: The home can be a dangerous place for some young people, especially if they are gay, lesbian or transgender.

Tiffany Cocco’s story illustrates this well.

“I wasn’t dealt the best cards in life,” she says with a bucketful of euphemism. “My parents were drug addicts, so I was put in foster care at age four.”

Her mother managed to regain custody, but then died two years later of Aids. Both her fathers too died soon after, and she ended up living with her grandfather.

Priorities, priorities

Sometimes, on an ordinary day, minding one’s own business, we cannot help but notice things that make us think beyond our private thoughts and about the wider world. And so it was one evening last month when I visited my father in hospital. I found him bored out of his wits.

“Why don’t you at least turn on the telly?” I asked.

“There’s nothing there.”

I wasn’t going to believe him so easily. So I fiddled with the remote to surf the channels. There were our handful of free-to-air channels (in other words, nothing worth watching), and another 6 or 7 cable channels. With the exception of the Cartoon Network, all the cable channels were Arabic. Three of them are imaged on this page – channels 15, 18 and 14. There were news, drama and even Arabic cartoons.

Transport landscape reflects Singapore’s income gap and rightwing ideology

Why are the rates charged by Singapore’s Electronic Road Pricing scheme (ERP) so low? Why aren’t they three or four times higher? This was the intriguing question posed (but not fully answered) by Christopher Tan, the Straits Times’ motoring correspondent in his op-ed 30 April 2012 (Time to rethink COE system?).

A window to the importance of design

Another maid falls to her death, making seven so far this year. There were altogether 24 in the last five years, according to John Gee, writing in the Straits Times (25 April 2012, Ensuring the safety of maids, by John Gee).

Minister of State for Community, Youth and Sports, Halimah Yacob, recently said that the cleaning of the exterior of windows should be banned (Straits Times, 23 April 2012, Halimah: Don’t let maids clean outside of windows). I find such calls problematic.

Firstly, this may be very hard to enforce, especially when most people want their windows clean.

For example,