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Gen Y Speaks: A place to call home

Early last month, a fire gutted a unit on the 15th floor at Block 78, Indus Road, one in a cluster of ageing flats nestled along a quiet stretch of the Singapore River. No lives were lost, and our family might well have paid less attention to the news, save for the fact that my grandparents – both in their 80s – live on the 9th floor. It got me thinking about the place I grew up in, and the different notions of home the older generations and young Singaporeans have.

Tucked between River Valley Road and Zion Road, the Indus Road and the adjacent Delta Avenue estate comprises eight or nine Housing Development Board (HDB) blocks, and faces a new mixed-use development across the river.

Tucked between River Valley Road and Zion Road, the Indus Road and the adjacent Delta Avenue estate comprises eight or nine Housing Development Board (HDB) blocks, and faces a new mixed-use development across the river.

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Early last month, a fire gutted a unit on the 15th floor at Block 78, Indus Road, one in a cluster of ageing flats nestled along a quiet stretch of the Singapore River. No lives were lost, and our family might well have paid less attention to the news, save for the fact that my grandparents – both in their 80s – live on the 9th floor.

Tucked between River Valley Road and Zion Road, the Indus Road and the adjacent Delta Avenue estate comprises eight or nine Housing Development Board (HDB) blocks, and faces a new mixed-use development across the river. It also houses the Boys’ Brigade Headquarters, Masjid Kampong Delta, and the former grounds of Delta East and Delta West Primary Schools.

Most of its residents are elderly, and so are the proprietors of the provision shops and laundromats that line the ground floors.

According to my grandmother, there was a huge commotion on the day of the fire, when the Civil Defence (SCDF) team arrived on the scene.

Though she could see the crowds gathering downstairs, she did not realise that the fire was several floors above, in her own block.

Later, we heard that someone had run from floor to floor to alert the residents. But either because their instructions were in English, or rendered indistinct by the noise below, my grandparents ignored the warning and chose to stay put.

Thankfully, the fire was swiftly extinguished. They, along with their neighbours, were spared from harm. 

Harrowing as this experience was, it brought home to us, as few other events could, the significance of my grandparents’ flat to all our lives.

My grandparents had previously lived in Bukit Ho Swee, and were relocated by the government to a flat in Tanglin Halt after the devastating fire of 1968.

Shortly after the Indus Road estate was built in the early 1970s, they moved with their five children into Block 78, first renting it before buying it over about a decade later. 

In that modest, three-room HDB flat, the family celebrated weddings, birthdays and graduations. By the turn of the millennium, four children were married and three grandchildren were born.

My cousins and I spent our first years in po-po's care, as our young parents started out on their careers.

Along with a classmate who lived upstairs, I attended the PAP Community Foundation kindergarten across the road at Block 79.

I was presented my very first school certificate by Dr. Lily Neo, who has served as Member of Parliament for Kim Seng since 1997.

Today, though the youngest among us is already in university, we still gather at Block 78 for dinner every weekend, prepared by po-po with her trademark recipe of love and experience.

My grandparents’ apartment, of course, is hardly unique: there are countless others like it which have seen generations of Singaporeans come of age.

And as the national debate over the ownership and lease of public housing rages on, such stories caution us against the assumption that HDB flats are primarily instruments of accumulation or speculation.

Just a few weeks before the fire at Indus Road, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced the Voluntary Early Redevelopment Scheme, a key initiative designed to allay fears about the declining lease value of ageing HDB flats.

While some laud it as a timely response to widespread concerns, others have raised deeper questions about the notion of asset enhancement for leasehold flats with depleting leases.

Missing from both sides of the conversation is a sense that for many Singaporeans, an HDB flat is not an asset first and foremost, but an address.

Tiny or nondescript as it may be, it is a place one can call ‘home’: a safe harbour of warmth and belonging. It also represents one’s place in the community, an anchor in the built fabric of the big city. 

Certainly, expectations have changed over time, and spending 45 years under the same roof – as my grandparents have – would now be unthinkable for many middle-class young Singaporeans.

Instead, ‘upgrading’ to a larger home or a better location when the opportunity arises is seen as a mark of individual taste and aspiration.

However, older Singaporeans, or those who have access to fewer resources, hold a different perspective.

Cashing in on early redevelopment would be emotionally costly for those like my grandparents, for example.

They would lose the home where they have painstakingly built their lives, and also face the bracing disorientation of a new neighbourhood.

Just as important as creating a fluid market for those who wish to move, I’ve realised, is the need to provide for and affirm those who choose to stay.

For a start, this means that the government’s housing decisions must be sensitive to human needs for community and continuity, while safeguarding financial security as far as possible.

But we have a part too, in seeing our own property decisions as long-term, intangible investments in a place, and the people around it.

Only then can we create lasting, meaningful connections to the places we call home.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Theophilus Kwek is a writer and researcher. A recent graduate of Oxford University, he studies migration issues and has been shortlisted twice for the Singapore Literature Prize.

This piece has been updated to reflect the fact that his grandparents have been living at Block 78 Indus Road since it was built in the early 1970s and not 1982, based on the author's clarification. 1982 was when the 99-year lease of his grandparents' flat started.

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