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The Global Profile
The Architect Who Made Singapore’s Public Housing the Envy of the World
With a focus on affordability, community, convenience and light, Liu Thai Ker replaced squalid slums with spacious high-rises. A recent spike in some sale prices, however, has saddened him.
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Liu Thai Ker, known as the architect of modern Singapore, at his office, in March.
By Sui-Lee Wee
Photographs by Chang W. Lee
Sui-Lee Wee, the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The New York Times, was raised in a public housing apartment in Singapore.
May 24, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET
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The high-rise apartments — some with panoramic views of Singapore’s tropical cityscape — are airy, light-filled and spacious enough to comfortably raise a family. They are also public housing units, and for decades, were emphatically affordable, giving Singapore an enviable rate of homeownership.
Now, however, at least a few of the apartments are being sold at a price that would have been unthinkable not long ago: more than $1 million.
“I’m sad to see that — because public housing must equal affordability,” said Liu Thai Ker, the urban planner who gets much of the credit for creating the country’s widely lauded approach to housing its citizens.
Now 86, Mr. Liu is considered the architect of modern Singapore because of his role overseeing the development of about half of the more than one million apartments that make up public housing in the small and exceptionally prosperous city-state of 5.6 million people.
Image
Some of the public housing projects offer panoramic views of Singapore’s skyline.
But in the 1960s, the country’s economic standing was starkly different. It was one of the poorest cities in Southeast Asia, where three out of four residents lived in overcrowded and filthy slums, in ramshackle houses with tin walls known as “squatters.”
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Sui-Lee Wee is the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The Times, overseeing coverage of 11 countries in the region. More about Sui-Lee Wee
Chang W. Lee has been a photographer for The Times for 30 years, covering events throughout the world. He is currently based in Seoul. Follow him on Instagram @nytchangster. More about Chang W. Lee
See more on: Lee Kuan Yew, I. M. Pei
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