Adam Oh is a prototypical Singaporean success story: he graduated from law school in 2024, secured a cushy job at a prestigious firm, and found a young woman with whom he hoped to settle down. In his spare time, he does acrobatic parkour “free running.” His life should be smooth sailing — at least, according to the many admirers on the Western Right of Singapore’s technocratic, interventionist government. Some conservative thinkers place outsized emphasis on material prosperity and societal order and are thus captivated by Singapore’s low crime rates and high standard of living, which often exceeds that in Western Europe.
For many years, the Singapore model, combining technocratic managerialism and authoritarianism, seemed to be working. The city-state has become synonymous with immaculate streets, reliable public transportation infrastructure, efficiency in civil service administration, and the upholding of exacting standards in public education. But the model is now faltering, and Oh’s tribulations trying to secure housing explain why.
Like most entry-level workers in Singapore, Oh turned to Singapore’s public housing authority — touted as a model system throughout the world — shortly after graduation in search of a starter home. He dutifully applied for a built-to-order, or BTO, apartment. Such apartments range in size from roughly 400 to 1,200 square feet and come with a side of social engineering: they’re reserved for singles who are over 35 or heterosexual couples who are married, providing an incentive to tie the knot young.
In other ways, they’re less ideal. They cost hundreds of thousands of Singapore dollars (about $0.79 to the US dollar), and they can’t be owned in perpetuity, but instead are leased from the government for 99 years. And they aren’t fitted with faucets, water heaters, or bedroom and bathroom doors unless one opts into an Optional Component Scheme for BTO flats. To avoid this system and renovate one’s home to one’s tastes, tenants must select from a list of contractors pre-approved by the government. And to get one in the first place, they must survive a balloting process.
Oh was relatively lucky, and his application took only two ballot attempts, many reams of paperwork, and about five months. Many others are less so. Young Singaporeans have increasingly begun to voice their frustrations at the state of public housing. Indeed, a TikTok video by a woman who had her ballots rejected 11 times recently went viral. The process was akin to a bureaucratic Groundhog Day.
Once the euphoria of rapid success began to wane, Oh was confronted with the sobering reality that he would have to wait approximately four calendar years before he could finally move into his flat — by which time he would be 30. “It is quite absurd that the government expects young Singaporeans to start a family when many of us won’t have a space to call our own before we hit our 30s,” he says.
Given these predictable fruits of a managed economy, it is curious that the anti-democratic segment of the Right has developed a romantic obsession with Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. Lee served as Singapore’s first prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and is regarded as having been pivotal to Singapore’s remarkable ascent from a third-world backwater to a first-world metropolis. Anti-democratic blogger and software developer Curtis Yarvin, who gained notoriety for advocating that states should be operated as for-profit corporations by CEO-monarchs, has celebrated Yew as a glittering example of a hegemonic figure who has developed an “effectively family-owned” state that delivers “a very high quality of service to … citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all.” Likewise, the far-Right philosopher Nick Land fawned over him for being an “autocratic enabler of freedom.”
For such figures, it’s attractive that LKY, as he was known during his lifetime, was a vocal skeptic of mass democracy. One of his most famous coinages is: “I have never believed that democracy brings progress. I know it to have brought regression.” He openly employed strongman rhetoric — “whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him or give it up!” — and he has been a global icon of single-minded managerialism and a technocratic, top-down governance style.
