You miss the shots you don’t take
Much has been written about housing prices, let’s talk about supply.
To be fair, there’s plenty of land supply. It seems incongruent that people are complaining about not being able to secure a flat, record breaking BTO queues, but yet MRT stations remain closed due to a lack of development around the area.
This is a situation that needs to be addressed. I have personally no skin in the game without a partner to apply for BTO with, nor am I 35 and thus am ineligible for a singles’ 2-bedroom unit, but from an outside-in perspective there’s things to see.
A wizard arrives exactly as he means to?
The fundamental issue here appears to be that they are not building where they should be building. This is to say, yes, they should be focusing their efforts on building housing near available transit.
We do see this happening in places like Tampines West, Lentor, and Dover Forest, but that’s not enough. I’m no fan of Tengah largely because of the incongruity between the completion of the Tengah BTOs (first ones scheduled for 2023–2024 AFAIK) and the completion of the JRL in Tengah (2028). Then of course on the TEL there’s the extreme case of us having to close MRT stations because there’s nothing nearby.
This also raises questions for TEL5. There’s a good chance that Bayshore and Bedok South stations will still open when train service begins because there’s still something in the area. These developments, namely the Bayshore Road condos and the area near Siglap CC, stand in the way of full station closures. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are likely to be as dead as some of the quieter DTL2 stations or even more, owing to the lack of development. Well, the government has plans sitting and ready, possibly waiting for the TEL construction sites to pack up, but they have to move quickly once that’s done.
There may be hope elsewhere. The EIA for the Miltonia Close estate, to launch next month, was released to HDB’s website roughly at the same time as that for Mount Pleasant. If the timing of the respective EIAs are of any indication, I’d make a guess that this means the first Mount Pleasant BTOs can be launched some time in 2023 for completion in 2028. Perhaps the station there can then be opened together with the Founders’ Memorial station, which is planned to open some time in 2027.
So the lesson here for the URA and HDB is to focus on building housing where there is already infrastructure, including transport infrastructure, to begin with. Of course, I’m assuming things like water and power mains are already there, since transport is usually the hardest part, and reinstatement after MRT construction works usually provide for those anyway.
If they instead choose to build where MRT works are a work-in-progress; or worse, only planned, they need to realize the impacts of that few years of inconvenience on longer-term trends such as car ownership. This can be avoided, especially since we now have ample land reserves around MRT stations; this possibility has increased as TEL3 is now almost-done and prime central area land needed for construction of the line is now free once again.
Steal this political issue
As at time of writing, some rather large plots in Orchard, Havelock and the area around Outram Park are now ripe for development following TEL3, but there’s an even larger wasted piece of land. I’m thus dedicating an entire section to Marina South and Marina East again because it just feels more and more strange the more I think about it.
Yes, make this a political issue. Start screaming from the rooftops on how they’ve (possibly, but not necessarily the URA) been sitting on empty land for over 30 years. Plans were announced in 2013 but nothing has come of it, only talk about developing 10,000 housing units in the area. I understand that considering what has happened in the past few years there’s a need to reorientate, but they could move faster here. Only in December 2022 will the first piece of land in Marina South be released to the market.
Worse, the 45ha appears to only cover the already-zoned area around Marina South and Gardens by the Bay stations, not the large swathes of empty reserve site southwest of Central Boulevard. There’s still plenty of White site within this area anyway, where zoning is flexible, but that might just be an attempt at future proofing where floor-by-floor uses can be different on a given site; a trend also seen in the recent URA Long-Term Plan.
In any case, the transport infrastructure in this zoned area doesn’t seem to be wanting. Central Boulevard and Marina Boulevard are wide four-lane roads with cycle paths on either side — I reckon the roads might be even wider without the paths. Marina Gardens Drive, three lanes each. The Marina Coastal Expressway has been a thing since 2014. And there are three MRT stations in the area. From my layman point of view, this seems to be more than ready, at least the areas directly around the MRT stations. Unspecified construction works have resulted in Marina Mall being closed since early 2022, but we’re not starting there.
At least they’re doing something with it, compared to the rest of the reserve land. There may be an explanation for the reserve land, especially in Marina East, that they want to wait for the Paya Lebar Air Base to move out and then develop with higher height limits. Rehabilitating the Nicoll Highway collapse site might also only pay off if a mixed-use development perhaps larger than Suntec City or MBFC can be built to maximize the land use and justify the investment needed, and that might also require raising or lifting of height limits too.
Well, how long can they wait? Perhaps it might help to release land faster, maybe even give some to HDB for their development under the PLH housing scheme; albeit this could backfire looking at the debate over the recent Ang Mo Kio BTO launch. For the rest of Marina South, perhaps the Greater Southern Waterfront development timelines could be rearranged to start putting things there instead of waiting for other hypotheticals like when the ports and the airbase are going to move out.
Further lessons
Our future rail developments have largely learnt from this. The NEL Extension is built right into the Punggol Digital District, guaranteeing some level of service being needed on day one. Tengah and the Jurong Innovation District will be ready before the JRL is, suboptimal as that may be. The eastern leg of the CRL provides improved connections to already existing communities and is merely playing catch up. Even Tampines North should be quite well-developed by the time CRL1 opens in 2030.
This leaves CCL6 and CRL2. While there may have been earlier plans somehow according to records in the NLB, the current plans for CCL6 are quite different. The current intention, to build the line for network-wide strategic reasons, means presumably only one viable route can be taken if they build the line before the port closure. That route thus doesn’t fully serve the old Tanjong Pagar port areas. Perhaps the 9th MRT line may also be needed in order to fill some coverage gaps here.
Thus, we only need to look more at CRL2 and the two stations meant for new development areas: Turf City and the Jurong Lake District. For Turf City, they probably can start soon, since the southern end of the Turf City area is near Sixth Avenue station and developments there can be served by that station, then work their way northwards. But like Bayshore and perhaps Lentor, it is likely that much of the land in Turf City nearer to the CRL station will have to be used to support the construction of the CRL, and that may restrict the short term possibilities in 2032 when the line opens.
If timelines are planned properly, the CRL project might be able to save money on restoring the land condition, simply not doing so if a property developer is going to move in and dig up the grass again anyway — something that TEL Bayshore and Bedok South might also be well-placed to follow. There is precedent — at Woodlands North, where much of the land around the station was dug up and not reinstated in the hope that the RTS will eventually be built someday. Well, the RTS is being built, and they were able to get to work faster because a fair bit of the land was already dug up by the TEL project, offsetting some of the extra time needed to build out underground station compared to Malaysia’s elevated one.
That said, it would probably make sense to try to maximize the developments within a 400m radius of the station, even if people find themselves having to walk or take a bus past construction sites in the early years.
Wipe the slate clean
Like Marina South, the Jurong Lake District has been on the table since 2013. But the lack of development there is somewhat excusable in that it has a more tumultuous history, due in part to the continuing political saga that is the HSR to Kuala Lumpur and the need to set aside land for it. At least it appears that the government has seen the HSR largely as a lost cause, and tweaked JLD plans to work around that. As one can see, the HSR terminus is now just a park, and what has eventually become Jurong Lake District station hasn’t gone anywhere.
It would probably do them some good to launch some land in JLD especially closer to the JRL station, for developments to be completed around the same time. But the rest will probably be further out, especially given that to better develop the area, the AYE will have to be realigned closer to Teban Gardens/Pandan Reservoir (which we haven’t heard about, more worryingly), and the current temporary bus interchange will have to be settled down into its permanent location at the Jurong East ITH. based on what is shown in the renders. Likely only then can the full pedestrian network planned for the Jurong Lake District start to take shape.
I would thus not be surprised if the decision is taken to mothball Jurong Lake District station as well, especially considering the distance from West Coast station, and if a crossover for trains to switch tracks can be built at or nearer to the former. To be fair, it’s also a waste that another station isn’t built closer to the JRL, in order to take advantage of potential land in the International Business Park that can be further densified.
But like Turf City, this may not be that much of an issue, again because of the need for land to be used for supporting CRL construction. Depending on where the CRL2/CRL3 boundary is and how the tunnels westwards in the Gul Circle direction are built, the CRL construction will likely also take even longer than at Turf City.
Or perhaps in the initial years, Jurong Lake District station might be able to support bus transfers for the Yuan Ching and Jalan Buroh areas, like Kranji station. But the bus facilities needed for this will have to be built by the CRL2 team or at least completed with the station. Lest the mistakes made at Springleaf are repeated, where the lack of bus terminating facilities makes it difficult for any additional service to be sent in that direction.
The key here is infrastructure readiness. From my layman’s point of view, if we already have that much land sitting around and almost-ready, it would be fair to start releasing more of it. Especially with so much scattered around the country, we are likely to be able to avoid a repeat of the 2000s when a large majority of development efforts were focused in Sengkang and Punggol, with the accompanying demographic consequences.
