In a recent television interview, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said one of his greatest regrets in his ten years as Prime Minister involves Singapore’s public housing.
“In retrospect, it’s easy to say that we should have been building up our infrastructure a lot faster; that we should have got our trains running; that we should have got our HDB flats built more,” he said.
“At that time, we thought we were doing the right thing, pacing it, measuring it out, building it when we needed it and not spending resources until we needed to spend them. It turned out that things didn’t pan out the way we expected and I think in the future, we have to plan in future less conservatively, and try to be less precise in our prognostications.”
From 2011 to 2013, HDB ramped up its building programme to build an average of 26,000 new HDB flats per year, and the 2014 BTO flat supply plan showed HDB started to transit to a more sustainable phase.
Muneerah Bee, Senior Journalist at PropertyGuru, wrote this story. To contact her about this or other stories email muneerah@propertyguru.com.sg
