Photo # 1
I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to housing, as described here two years ago by copying and pasting from The Conversation
What Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed land, provides mortgages, and allows buyers to use their compulsory retirement savings (what Australians call superannuation) for both a deposit and repayments.
There’s more to it than that. It limits eligibility by income and age, requires owners to hang on to the property for five years, and limits their resale to only other eligible buyers.
Eight in ten of all the dwellings in Singapore today were built over the past half century by the Housing Development Board.
Photo # 2
I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to mass transit.
Photo # 3
And I’m super excited that we are about to have something just like this in Auckland.
Well, something like this.
How great is an underground system that doesn’t need a mind the gap warning because it has no more train/platform gap than you find stepping into an elevator??
Photo # 4
This is not to say they’re great at everything.
You notice labourers lining up for work at big sites and being carted around on the back of trucks like the ones below and you recall how when Covid rolled in, immigrant labourers housed in cheap dormitory camps were more or less left to fend for themselves.
Wherever you go, you find people doing things better than we do back home. Wherever you go, you find people doing things that would make us pretty uneasy.
Archival photo
I have been fascinated for the longest time by the phenomenon of people needing to lay their hands on an exhibit, even if there’s a ten foot sign saying WARNING, WASH HANDS AFTER TOUCHING. What’s also interesting is where they tend to lay them and sometimes that’s more than clear enough.
Here we see, on the walk towards the Marina Bay Sands precinct, some lovely family portraiture, and a sign of maybe human warmth, or maybe the yearning to be part of something that represents that.
And a little farther along we find that not only has the Island State been recently graced with business profundities of global citizen Luxon*, but John Key has been here too.
* More on that tomorrow
