Khaw Boon Wan is churning out so many flats within a year, averaging 25,000 or more. The latest announcement was 33,568 for this year. And this is still not enough and the demand is mounting.
With the benefits of hindsight, we can see what happened over the last few years. We, the low down untalented citizens, only have hindsight to say our piece. Foresight is only the reserve of the supertalents. With foresight, over the horizon ability, they could predict the future, plan ahead, nip problems in the bud before they went out of control. With hindsight, we can see how problems were not nip in the bud, no proactive actions, and problems got blown out of proportion.
We now know the cutting down of building HDB flats to less than 10,000 units for several years prior to Boon Wan’s ramping up the building of new flats was a gross mistake. We also know that there were pent up demands by a growing population. We also know that when HDB was not building enough flats, the population was increasing like crazy with hundreds of thousands of foreigners being allowed into the island and needing more flats. Hindsight can tell the uninformed and ill informed citizens of the truth, of what really happened and what really went wrong.
Did the super talents with their foresight saw what were coming? Definitely. They cannot be that stupid right? And neither could they be sleeping on the job and not knowing that so many foreigners were let into the country and the cutting down in building HDB flats would cause a big shortage of housing while the demand was rising.
What actually happened then that resulted in such a huge housing shortage problem and the ballooning of housing prices? What were they thinking or planning or scheming?
With all the foresight and hindsight, maybe someone would want to tell the people what actually went ‘right’? Got to say right, saying what went wrong would not be nice and would not get an answer. What went right?
Chua Chin Leng AKA RedBean
*The writer blogs at http://mysingaporenews.blogspot.com/