Private estates badly kept? Says who?

I REFER to Monday’s report, ‘En bloc debate, HK style’, which mentions, inter alia, that Singapore is two-thirds the size of Hong Kong. This means the Republic has a smaller buffer of land and cannot afford to leave decaying buildings untouched for long.

Older Singaporeans remember with dismay the 1960 and 1970s when the Government had a policy of ‘Stop at two’ and made it clear that parents who ignored the campaign to limit family size to just two children would have to pay the price financially.

The principal reason for this unpopular policy was Singapore’s land size. If I recall, the optimum population that could be comfortably accommodated was about three million.

However, that policy has proven over the years that Nature knows best and Singaporeans began to be concerned about the declining rate of population growth.

The result is that today couples are urged to have more than two children and not to worry about being crowded out as Singapore can hold six million people, though more recently, that figure has been tweaked to a slightly lower number.

Meanwhile, Singapore encourages nationals of selected countries to settle here and become permanent residents.

Finally, the report insinuates that private estates tend to have ‘decaying buildings’ just because they were built decades ago. Just because HDB takes care of only HDB estate upgrading, it does not mean private property owners let their properties decay.

Denis Distant

Source : Straits Times – 15 Aug 2009