Photos: Wikipedia, We Love Punggol
On August 29, the Housing Development Board (HDB) announced their development plans for three new housing areas via the launch of public exhibition Future Homes, Better Lives, which is on at the HDB Atrium from now till September 15.
Tampines North sounds harmless enough—the green extension of Tampines Town will contain the meandering Boulevard Park linking Sun Plaza to Sungei Api Api, a Quarry Park that will eventually connect to Pasir Ris Town, plus the highly-anticipated cycling and pedestrian network.
But plans for the Bidadari and Punggol Matilda areas seem more questionable than aspirational.
As if it wasn’t creepy enough that where Woodleigh MRT Station is standing now used to be the Muslim and Christian graves—exhumed in 2004 for redevelopment—that made up the notoriously famous Bidadari Cemetery, HDB has decided the new housing area the MRT station serves will adopt the cemetery’s name. They’ve also revealed that Bidadari will feature “six distinctive neighbourhoods, each with unique identities through the use of varied building forms that respond to the different characteristics of Bidadari”. In addition, you can expect a Heritage Walk that will capture “fond memories of Bidadari’s heritage”. We’re not sure what this means, but unless the Addams Family’s moving in, it’s highly unlikely that anyone’s going to ballot for flats shaped like tombstones.
Then there’s the case of naming Punggol Matilda after the century-old bungalow Matilda House (read the comments), which in its glorious days was a sprawling estate with a stable and tennis estates owned by the Cashin family. The dilapidated building was granted conservation status by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) in 2000 and still stands today, but mostly brings to mind the image of a haunted house. The site is protected with fencing and a CCTV camera, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from making regular photo trips there. HDB’s plans involve turning the area into a symbol of neighbourliness it seems, with a Community Street and “landscaped decks that provide ‘door-step’ accessibility to the precinct amenities”, which we assume includes Matilda House. The Straits Times reported last year that property developer Sim Lian Group wants to turn the historical bungalow into a condominium clubhouse—presumably for the brisk-selling A Treasure Trove—in 2015.
If Singaporeans don’t mind having ghosts as neighbours then we guess tombstone-shaped houses aren’t that far-fetched.
