Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdf | Hacker News Reader

You may want to read the link you cited. Also, Little India is not impoverished. It just looks so to a casual tourist. The fact is rent in Singapore is substantially driven by their accessibility to Little India.

View on HN

I said it was "relatively impoverished". Singapore has a high GINI coefficient for a country so developed. Despite that, living in the bottom 5% of income in Sg is still much better than most countries because of subsidized public housing.

Little India is only "impoverished" relative to Sentosa Cove. The MRT station has an exit facing the back of the Istana (the Presidential Palace), there are plenty of condos popular with Western expats (City Square especially), high end malls, hipster cocktail and coffee bars and expensive design shops in shophouses.

It is one stop away from Dhoby Ghaut, the MRT station with the most connections to anywhere in the island, and three from Orchard, the one with arguably the highest commercial rents.

It's not fair to equate its location with income levels or quality life in a place like Sg. It's not organized the way big cities in the US or western Europe are.

My point about it being relatively impoverished was that the majority of the Indian immigrant laborers live there. Relative to the average Sg citizen, they are living in poverty.

No, they do not. They live in areas like the West industrial zones where rent is much cheaper, and commute to the sites by bus. HDBs, the government-built social housing towers you might see in photos, are by law racially mixed to population proportions and not available to non-citizen (some are available to permanent residents, which WP holders are not).

The lowest class by salary of any society lives, by definition, in poverty compared to the others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com