Housing had been a persistent problem for Singapore since the early years of the twentieth century. Reports produced by visiting health and sanitary authorities in 1907 spoke of overcrowding and insanitary conditions in heavily populated parts of the island's city area. A Housing Commission report in 1918 noted that poorer residents could not afford to pay rent for individual flats for each family, causing a “general subdivision of housing space into cubicles thus further aggravating the overcrowding conditions and leading to a high percentage of sickness and a high rate of mortality”. It recommended the creation of an Improvement Commission, which in turn resulted in the setting up of the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) in 1927.

SINGAPORE IMPROVEMENT TRUST

Writing two decades later, SIT Chairman L. Rayman noted that its mission was “to rehouse the people and to abolish the fearful slums of the town with their terrible overcrowding and their attendant evils of crime and disease”. How far the SIT lay from achieving its goal is manifest in its own publication, The Work of the Singapore Improvement Trust 1927–1947, which blames its “limited means” and “circumscribed powers” for its woes. For example, the colonial government earmarked, and placed at the SIT's disposal, $10 million in 1926 for the clearance of slums, but the fund's nature and purpose were never defined clearly, and at the end of 1947, it had decreased to a miserly half-a-million dollars. Then, the government's General Improvement Plan for Singapore was not intended to be a complete plan for the entire island. “It is merely a record of existing development together with layouts and subdivisions which have reached the stage of statutory approval. It has been built up in piecemeal fashion in circumstances over which the Trust has had no control.” Consequently, the SIT undertook practically no improvement schemes in the decade from 1937 because its energies were directed to working on back lanes and ordinary planning duties.