I spent a while this week thinking that I would change apartments on the 1st. I’ve pretty much given up on that idea — I seem to’ve missed the narrow window for short-term rentals. But, in the meantime, I’ve been checking out various neighborhoods here, inspired by listings in the want-ads.
A very high percentage of the roommate ads I see are for places in ‘Yishun’ (I’m not sure if that counts as a town or a neighborhood) so I rode the train out there. It turns out to be where more-or-less everyone must live — giant public housing buildings going on for many blocks in every direction.
Public Housing is funny here. It’s almost all ownership-based (what we’d call ‘condos’ at home) and seems to be entirely safe and well maintained. Plenty of the buildings have retail, daycare, and schools on the first floor.
In a typically proactive move, the government here seems to’ve decided to provide decent housing to all of its citizens back in the 60’s and them instantly done so. (To someone raised during the Reagan years, this sounds like hubris. But in Singapore it’s just business-as-usual.) So architecturally everything looks like the worst of the US ghetto towers, even down to the crack-epidemic-invoking names:
The buildings in Yishun were largely open on the first floor. This is great for walkability — but as I strolled around, my American-city-trained instincts screamed that I should turn back, that I was walking straight into either a drug market or a mugger’s ambush. Of course, the fact that everything smelled strongly of baking bread helped to ease that a bit.
And then there’s the landscaping. All and all, it’s pretty much like the first reel of the Wizard of Oz, except that instead of picking up a Kansas farmhouse the tornado has picked up Cedar Towers. And instead of dropping them in Oz, it dropped them in the middle of the Waikiki Hilton Village.
