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Comment by jesterson | Hacker News Reader

> essentially everybody is entitled to a tiny but nearly-free rental flat

It's been pointed out already, but pretty much every word in this part of sentence is wrong. You may want to learn a bit more about Singapore HDB. Ah, I beg your pardon, you're absolutely right about tiny part.

Short answer: not everybody, not entitled, not anywhere nearly free (where is this even comes from?).

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Overly broad and vague, but not that far off the mark. If you're a citizen or PR you are entitled to an HDB if your income isn't too high. If you can't afford to buy an HDB (with many gov't grants), you can rent an HDB. If you're really low income, the rent can be very low (ten's of SGD per month).

So basically if you're a SC/PR, you won't go without decent housing in Singapore. That's actually quite impressive for countries in SE Asia.

I saw a good number of homeless camping in, for instance, East Coast park.

Yes, there are an estimated 1,000 people sleeping rough. The study below determined that 40% of them actually own/rent housing, but don't use it because of eg. family conflicts, while the remainder either choose not to apply or have somehow fallen through the cracks of the system.

https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/gia/article/singapore's-hidden-hom...

Erhm, if you want to camp in East Coast Park (or anywhere on public land in Singapore), you need to apply for a permit and it's only allowed at designated camping grounds. The campers you saw were recreational, and seldom stay for more than one night. On most weekdays you won't see any tents at East Coast.

That's what I thought initially. My curiosity was piqued because they were in a non designated area and I thought it was weird that the police weren't making an effort to get rid of them.

A friend of mine said it was coz they were homeless and the police were aware.

In other countries they'd probably be moved on by police trying to make them some other department's problem. This could be the place where they ended up where they caused the least headache coz they did somewhat blend in.

It wasn't just east coast park either. There were several who slept on benches outside of my HDB in Clementi and Tiong Bahru. They tended to wake up early.

Oh, that's interesting. I had not heard of such cases, nor have I seen them. Do you remember which part of the park this was? I'll keep an eye out next time I am there.

Actually I got confused - I think it was up in Changi Beach park (connected to East Coast park, I used to cycle the whole route).

I left ~5 years ago so I'm not going to guarantee they're still there.

I'm pretty sure the HDB void decks still have their fair share of homeless tho.

> I'm pretty sure the HDB void decks still have their fair share of homeless tho.

Can confirm. I wrote about this in another thread 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26811554

Feel free to walk to Sentosa from HF around midnight. You will find tens of people sleeping around. And yea, they do not have permits of any kind if you'd like to suggest it (neither people sleeping at east coast park have, except people who really do camping there).

Police doesn't care just because Sentosa is pretty much desolated at night, so noone complains or sees them.

There are few other places to mention, way far from HDB/condo settlements in order to maintain a nice picture of homelessness absence.

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