Three in four residents live in public housing.

01 The 76%, and why that figure surprises

The agency is called the Housing and Development Board, HDB for short, and it was created on 1 February 1960. Since then it has built 1,277,918 dwellings. The stated long-term target is 1,650,000.

One widely circulated figure is worth correcting: you often read that 80% or even 82% of Singaporeans live in public housing. Those numbers are dated. The current figure is 76%, and it has been drifting slightly downward for years. It is still, by an enormous margin, the highest proportion in the world.

02 A fire in 1961 accelerated everything

The starting point was not promising. The previous body, the Singapore Improvement Trust, had built about 23,000 dwellings across thirty-two years of existence, between 1927 and 1960. In 1960, only 9% of the population lived in them, and more than 250,000 people were crowded into the centre in substandard housing and informal settlements; cases were documented of eleven households — some eighty-three people — sharing a single shophouse.

On 25 May 1961, a fire swept through the Bukit Ho Swee settlement. It burned from mid-afternoon until night, destroyed more than 2,800 houses and huts, killed four people and injured fifty-four, and left around 16,000 people homeless at a stroke.

The answer was pace. The HDB's first five-year plan, from 1960 to 1965, delivered 54,430 units: more than double what its predecessor had raised in three decades. And the pace kept climbing: 113,819 units between 1971 and 1975, and 200,377 between 1981 and 1985, the all-time record. Most of the fire's victims were rehoused within about a year.

03 Buying, not renting, for 99 years

Here is the structural difference from social housing in almost any other country. HDB flats are not mostly rented: they are sold. The national home-ownership rate is around 91%, meaning roughly nine in ten households own the home they live in.

That ownership takes a particular form: you buy a 99-year lease counted from the building's completion. On expiry, flat and land revert to the state. It is a model that works well while the stock is young and raises uncomfortable questions as the oldest blocks approach the end of their term; buy-back and redevelopment programmes exist, but under 5% of blocks have ever been selected for redevelopment.

Since 1989 there has also been a planning rule allocating quotas by ethnic origin in each block and each neighbourhood, with the stated aim of preventing separate enclaves from forming. The percentages are updated monthly and apply to resale flats. It is a central piece of how the population is distributed across the territory, and it explains why Singapore's neighbourhoods resemble one another so closely in composition.

04 What sits underneath every block

The most characteristic element of this architecture is not a tower: it is a void. Almost every block leaves the ground floor open, without walls, columns only. It is called a void deck, and it is deliberate: weddings and funerals are held there, childcare centres are installed, along with corners for the elderly, study rooms, kiosks and community events. It is the building's social space, and it works precisely because it was never assigned a fixed use.

Around it, planning works by scales: the precinct has a market, a coffee shop and a playground; the neighbourhood adds schools, a community club and a park; the full town adds a shopping centre, a polyclinic, a library, a sports complex and an MRT station. Cumulatively, official figures count 18,484 shops and eating establishments built by the agency itself.

05 Where to see it without leaving your itinerary

You do not need to detour far. Tiong Bahru, a short hop from downtown, preserves twenty blocks of pre-war public housing, built between 1937 and 1941 in streamline moderne style — curved corners, porthole windows, horizontal banding — and officially protected since 1 December 2003. It is the most elegant example and the easiest to visit.

At the opposite extreme is the Pinnacle@Duxton, completed on 13 December 2009: seven fifty-storey towers of 156 metres, 1,848 homes and two continuous sky gardens of five hundred metres each, on the 26th and 50th floors. The 50th-floor one can be visited. That a building with those design credentials is ordinary public housing sums up the country's approach fairly well.

And it is worth knowing that this landscape also disappears. Rochor Centre, four blocks painted yellow, blue, green and red and built in 1977, was for decades one of the city's most photographed sights; it was demolished between June 2018 and April 2019 to make room for a road corridor. If something catches your eye in a residential district, photograph it: here the built stock is renewed without sentimentality.