Portrait of a Low-Income Neighbourhood

1. Iftar

At 6.30pm, the hawker stalls are closed for the day, but today the hawker centre is far from quiet. We have commandeered 4 rows of beige tables, which fairly groan with aluminium trays containing mounds of watermelon chunks, bee hoon, curries, roti jala, nuggets, seaweed chicken and plenty more. 10 or so mothers’ headscarved heads are bent together in the wordless communion of food preparation, placing paper napkins just so and passing plastic utensils back and forth.

Someone has choped the entire section of the hawker centre by placing little plastic baggies of dates in the centre of each table. Here, few dads and teenage children lounge, occasionally making desultory conversation.

In contrast, chaos reigns along the concrete walkway next to the hawker centre. A surging sea of children scream and thrash and race and hurl paper airplanes ineffectually and play their incomprehensible games.

Brown bodies, in quantities seldom seen outside of Geylang bazaar at Ramadan, throng the venue. My ears, accustomed to library silence, ring with a musical babble of Malay, of which I could only pick out the most rudimentary of playground insults.

I scan the crowd for my new supervisor. “Welcome to Jalan Bukit Merah,” she says.

It’s the first day of my internship at Beyond Social Services and I am plunged into the deep end in this community Iftar party.

I had just been to my own neighbourhood’s Iftar organised by the People’s Association, and it was nothing like this. That had been a sit-down affair policed by slightly psycho government volunteer types. The handful of bored-looking token Malay families there were outnumbered by the Chinese middle-class residents making grating remarks such as: “Nowadays my block got all races, upstairs Indian, downstairs Malay, Burmese also got.”

Noticing that I am standing about like an idiot, my supervisor urges: “Go and mingle.” I am introduced to a 12-year-old and make the mistake of saying “hello, it’s nice to meet you” while proffering my hand. The girl the rolls her eyes and laughs at me. I die inside.

Feeling like a welcome outsider is an apt way to start my foray into social services. I learn that Singapore’s low-income rental blocks (households earning $1,500 or less) see a steady stream of social workers and volunteers on a daily basis.

The tenants do not seem much perturbed by our presence. Yet they do not admit us into the inner circle from the get-go. (There is a complex social hierarchy of neighbourly and family ties within the blocks. Often both kinds of ties exist: extended families are spread across different units in the same cluster of flats.) Well-intentioned outsiders are part of the scenery, like the pigeons.

2. Kitchen

In Singapore one is almost not allowed to be poor. We’re one of the most expensive cities in the world after all; a nation obsessed with progress and success. Before working here, I thought that rental tenants’ relationship with their flats would range from ambivalence (it’s just a temporary shelter before I make my way back up the societal ladder) to shame (unhappy reminder of my lack of success).

Of course my assumptions were completely wrong. While there are 1 or 2 residents who stigmatise their dwellings, the majority turns out to love, care for, and take pride in their homes - just like the rest of us.

One of the community families we work with lives in a rental unit on the ground floor. Given that rental flats only go up to 2-rooms, regardless of the size of the family, a ground floor unit offers a major advantage: extra space.

Mum presides over the simple shipshape kitchen: tiny sink, chest freezer doubling up as a worktop, portable stove, spices arranged to a pleasingly OCD level in identical Valu$ plastic containers. When we drop by, she is making sambal sardines with rice and fried nuggets - a typical dinner. We have our own dinners, bought from a pop-up “market” at another rental block, but she invites us to share her meal anyway.

We all sit companionably in the “backyard”, an alfresco dining area rigged up with tarp roof, foldable tables and stackable chairs. It spills onto the concrete skirting of the building where her children, aged maybe 3 to 9, play as they wait to break fast. The toddler mysteriously takes a shine to me, babbling and chirping happily as we watch YouTube Kids videos.

After dinner, some friends drop by to hang out at the backyard. One of them starts smoking, and the house-proud mum’s immediately scolds: “Oei! Don’t drop your cigarette ash here ah, I just scrubbed the floor this morning!”

The backyard also serves as storage area for the family’s collection of supersized party equipment: trolleys, insulated food/drink bins, picnic mats, large-capacity coolers, etc. Such assets are commonplace (and frequently shared) in the neighbourhood. Without much disposable income for entertainment and dining out, it seems getting together and sharing food is one of the few low-cost ways for families to amuse themselves.

3. Home

How did you end up living here? is the question I am dying to ask each person who answers the door. I don’t have to - they readily tell me.

Once upon a time, the common story goes, they were happily married and owned an HDB flat together. (Just like the rest of us.) But then the marriage fell apart. So, they had to sell the house. They didn’t have enough money to buy their own place, and someone referred them to the government rental scheme. Since then they’ve been here.

After the divorce, they - many of the people I spoke to are women - had to raise the kids, so they weren't able to work. Therefore their low-income status persisted for another 10 to 20 years.

Some met new partners and got married after moving to a rental. However, the man being typically the sole breadwinner, this usually wasn't enough to lift them out of the poverty line (to qualify for subsidised rental, the income ceiling is $1,500 per household). And often they made more children, which kept the women out of employment for longer.

Once the kids get a bit older, most women jump at the first chance to get back into work. But the only times they could work was when the kids were in school - a few hours in the mornings. It's not easy to find part-time employment that works for this schedule. The options are generally limited to cashiering at a supermarket or being a part-time cleaner at a mall.

The low status of these jobs has nothing to do with the merit of the worker. A lot of these women were clearly way too smart/competent/skilled/resourceful to be cleaning toilets, but there just isn't any work that fits with their responsibilities.

As their kids become more independent (often, the eldest is in charge of caring for all the younger siblings while mum goes to work) some women may increase their working hours to full-time. Only at this point can they start catching up on years of unearned income and CPF. 

But The Rules slow down the process of reintegrating the poor back into mainstream society. Suppose you're living in a rental. Once your household income goes up beyond $1,500, you no longer qualify for subsidised rent of $100-200 a month. HDB won't evict you, but they'll increase your rent. A couple of residents who started working full-time estimate that rent and conservancy fees come up to nearly $700 a month. That’s a $500+ monthly marginal tax when you convert to full-time work.

On the one hand, paying full-price rental motivates residents to buy their own homes. But the added expense slows down their rate of savings. So the journey from renting to owning a home can take a very long time. One woman I spoke to is finally getting her 2nd BTO after an agonising 24-year wait.

I had assumed that most renters would want to “upgrade” to purchasing their own flats once they got the chance. But this upwards drift isn’t quite as irresistible as it seems. I encounter at least 3 complications:

1. LOCATION: Many tenants have lived in the central region a long time and are well-embedded in the location: family, school and work are all nearby (one father cycles to his cleaning job in Orchard). They would like to own a home nearby, but a resale flat in the area costs close to $1 million - out of the question. But neither is moving to a cheaper, far-away area like Woodlands as it would throw the entire family’s work/school/care arrangements into disarray.

2. FLAT SIZE: Rental flat residents are heartily sick of living in 1- or 2-room flats. It’s not strictly a matter of space, but of privacy, especially with growing children - sibling rape has been said to happen in rentals. The idea of owning their own 2-room flat is therefore not at all an enticement. “If I have to pay a home loan anyway,” Vietnamese single mother says to me, “then it has to be at least a 3-room flat.”

3. OTHER CONCERNS: I meet a family with plans to move into a condo in Johor Bahru. They would like a home with a private pool for their son, a competitive para-swimmer, to train in. At (say) RM600,000 for a modest 2-bedroom condo it would be cheaper than any resale 3-room flat in Singapore.

4. Work

I am having a casual conversation with the 12-year-old who snubbed me that Iftar so many weeks ago. It’s possibly the highlight of my year. We are talking about work. She asks me how much I make as an intern at Beyond. “Not much,” I say, trying to play it cool. “Maybe $450 a month?”

“That’s not bad, actually,” she says. “My father makes a bit more than you. He works in a shipyard, you see. But then, his work is harder and yours is easier.”

Well, there you go. Yes, low-income people do work. But it’s painful and shameful to think about how hard some Singaporeans have to work just to scrape by (“a bit more” than $450!?) and so I can imagine that it’s preferable for the better-off to imagine they’re lazy or won’t upskill themselves to be more attractive to employers.

It is a tragic society that cannot pay people a reasonable income to work in manual jobs, under harsh conditions. The fact that they have little education or didn’t do well in school is not a good excuse not to pay them better.

Besides, existing capabilities are grossly underutilised because of the rigidity of the job market. A fantastic home chef works as a cleaner because there aren't any culinary jobs that fit around her caregiving commitments. An experienced former driver becomes a pump attendant because he is illiterate and can't use the Grab app. There are people who sell flowers all day at the cemetery - not the kind of thing you do if you have many other options, right?

It saddens me to see smart young people, full of wisecracks, expend their bodies delivering cargo for a living. It’s not that I think manual labour is beneath them, but I think society as a whole suffers when bright young people aren’t participating in the economy mentally. The only thing they lack is paper qualifications. Does that really matter so much, when your average white-collar office worker is a brain-dead K-drama zombie anyway? What a shame.

Manual work (e.g. shipyard), part-time work (e.g. cleaner), gig work (e.g. delivery) and microbusinesses (e.g. catering) are the most common types of wage work within the low-income neighbourhood.

But I also want to mention another kind of labour: work-for-benefits. I hear of a “friend of a friend” who does that full-time, asking for financial aid from at least 3 or 4 organisations every month. Doing so, he can make up to $3,000 a month, says my informant. I ask my informant if he’s ever considered doing that. He makes a face. “Nah, I’m OK. I’m not so hard up until I need to tahan all their dirty looks. Some of those social service organisations really treat you like shit.” It’s not easy money, that’s for sure.

So these are the common stories of people living in low-income rental flats, the "projects" of Singapore. I was surprised by how "typically Singaporean" some of them are. That worries me. Did I unconsciously exclude rental flat residents from our ordinary social fabric? Did I think they weren't allowed to be part of the "Singapore dream"?

I had subconsciously thought of the residents as “other”. Just imagine: deviants, solely on the basis of housing type! But, after all, owning a home is kind of the baseline of success in Singapore. HDB is always hammering it into our heads how affordable public housing is. Getting a house is kind of like getting a "pass" grade in life.

I didn't realise how lucky one has to be to own a flat and continue to own it. Just one unlucky misstep - unplanned pregnancy, cheating spouse - and you might end up in a stigmatised community.

By the way, I've learnt that there isn't such a thing as an objectively "bad" or "good" neighbourhood. Talking to residents in the same estate, I'm struck by how wildly different their pronouncements can be.

The ones who thrive tend to be the active volunteers, the ones who are plugged into their community. They feel they live in an abundant neighbourhood with a good support network and kind neighbours. Then there are those keep their doors closed and keep to themselves. They're ashamed of their dirty shabby surroundings and disgusted by their gangster junkie neighbours. Perceptions inform actions that confirm those same perceptions... a very human vicious circle.

On my last day of surveying, I catch a glimpse 2 of our residents, husband and wife, strolling hand-in-hand at 3pm, probably on their way to collect the kids from school. The sight of them makes me smile.

Mum has a round baby face, likes to wear dungarees, and she has the childlike attitude to match. She grins easily, without reservation. She wonders aloud if she should apply for a rental in Marine Parade to be near the beach. Dad has a shy, lean, Doberman-like demeanour, and he is just as loyal, it seems. The joyful couple enjoy working together (last I heard, he plans to be a school bus driver while she is the attendant) and they radiate such domestic felicity that it is very, very hard to imagine them as “needy”.