Singapore saved a bungalow for the public good. Why not two forests?

On 31 July, the government took possession of 38 Oxley Road. The Singapore Land Authority and the National Heritage Board didn’t need to explain themselves twice.

The property had been gazetted a national monument in December 2025, over the written objection of its owner, Lee Hsien Yang, who told the Prime Minister’s Office in plain terms that his late father wanted the family house demolished — a wish Lee Kuan Yew had stated, by the government’s own account, “clearly and unambiguously” throughout his life.

Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore (MCCY)’s answer to that objection was one sentence: the decision “is made in the public interest, and goes beyond the personal preferences of any individual.”

“Preserving the Site will allow current and future generations of Singaporeans to reflect upon significant events in our nation’s history that took place there, and the ideals and values that have shaped Singapore.” — MCCY on gazetting of 38 Oxley as a National Monument

Fine. Let’s take the government at its word.

If a single bungalow’s historic significance is sufficient to override the express wishes of the man who built its legacy and the family that owns it — if “public interest” is a strong enough instrument to survive that — then the principle is established. Public good can outrank private preference in Singapore. The government didn’t hedge this. It said so, in an official release, and then followed through with compulsory acquisition.

Now put that principle beside two other sites the government is currently deciding on. Maju Forest is the regenerating secondary forest along the old Jurong railway corridor in Clementi, within the Housing Development Board (HDB)’s Sunset Way study area. Gillman Barracks is the former British military site in Alexandra — now known for its arts and heritage precinct — whose Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) study area contains its own stretch of native-dominated secondary forest, connected to the wider Southern Ridges green corridor.

Different histories, different site names, but the same question sitting under both: HDB has proposed housing on land its own commissioned scientists say carries serious, largely irreversible ecological cost. For simplicity, this piece refers to them from here as the two forests.

To be clear about what’s being compared here: a Preservation Order under the Preservation of Monuments Act and an HDB development decision are different statutory instruments, built on different tests, answerable to different processes. Nobody is arguing NHB’s gazette power should apply directly to a forest, or that an environmental rating and a heritage assessment measure the same thing. That’s not the claim.

The claim is narrower, and harder to wave away: both processes rest on the government’s own expert bodies identifying an exceptionally weighty public interest — in one case sufficient to override a family and a founding leader’s will outright, in the other, apparently, insufficient to outweigh a housing timeline. The instruments differ. The pattern of whose findings get deference and whose get managed does not.

The consultants HDB commissioned rate the loss of native secondary forest at both sites at the highest severity category their assessment framework allows.

At Gillman Barracks, the EIA counts 293 plant species and 178 fauna species within the study area, 22 flora and 11 fauna species of conservation significance among them, and rates the direct loss of native-dominated secondary forest as Major Negative — the only impact pathway on the table to receive that rating before mitigation.

At Sunset Way, covering Maju Forest, the report records 286 plant species and 113 fauna species, and its own summary table puts the biodiversity impact score at -180 to -12, Major Negative to Slight Negative, before mitigation. After every proposed measure is applied, the range only moves to -135 to -6 — still Major Negative to No Significant Impact. Major Negative never leaves the range.

At Gillman, fifty-eight of the sixty-one fauna species assessed for habitat loss remain rated Major Negative once every corridor and retention measure has been applied. A critically endangered plant at Gillman, represented on site by a single known specimen, will be felled, because the report concludes it cannot practically be saved.

This is not activist rhetoric. It is HDB’s own commissioned reports, at both sites, returning the most severe finding available to them.

At Oxley Road, an expert finding treated as sufficiently weighty was enough to support extraordinary state action. At the two forests, an environmental finding of the highest severity becomes an input into “how much can we retain,” not a question of whether to proceed at all.

The public explanation has not shown why one exceptionally weighty finding was sufficient to support an override, while the other earns a consultation period. That is the inconsistency. Not that a house and a forest are the same thing — they plainly aren’t — but that the same government extends radically different deference to its own experts depending on which agency is on the other side of the finding.

The defence the government hasn’t quite made — but which its own messaging keeps gesturing at — is that the two forests have to go for the next generation. More marriages, more families, more homes needed down the line.

The public figures make that claim impossible to assess. Singapore’s total fertility rate hit 0.87 in 2025, a fresh historic low. Marriage rates continue to fall. The only population figure the government has ever committed to is a planning ceiling of 6.5 to 6.9 million by 2030, with no number ever given for what happens after.

There is a second meaning of “future generations” the public explanation has not reckoned with. In preserving 38 Oxley Road, the government treated what a nation’s children inherit — its history, physically standing — as a public good worthy of extraordinary protection.

A future generation will otherwise encounter the two forests only in an old photograph or video footage and a parent’s explanation of what used to be there. If future generations justify building on them, they also count in favour of preserving them. The government has already decided that what we leave behind can matter enough to override a family’s wishes. It has not shown why that reasoning stops at the tree line.

The government has also already told the world forests matter enough to act on. In 2021, Singapore endorsed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use, committing to work toward halting and reversing forest loss by 2030.

The Ministry of National Development (MND)’s own statement at the time said it was “crucial to ensure sustainable land use and the conservation of forests,” and pledged a “science-based approach” to balancing development against it.

The two forests are not the whole of that pledge; Singapore’s commitment was collective and global, not a guarantee for any one site. But if Singapore invokes this commitment while permitting forest clearance at home, it should publish the accounting method: what is cleared, what is restored, how ecological value is distinguished from mere tree cover, and where sites like Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks sit in that balance.

Without that, “science-based” is not a standard the public can assess. It is a conclusion they are asked to accept. None of this proves demand modelling doesn’t exist. It may well exist, in detail, inside HDB and MND. But if it exists, it hasn’t been shown to the public whose forests are being asked to absorb it.

So put the question plainly: if the housing need behind these two developments is real and specific enough to justify clearing the near-irreplaceable secondary forest both EIAs describe, publish the modelling — the population and household assumptions, the time horizon, the alternative sites considered, and why these sites, now. If that modelling can’t be published, the public is entitled to ask what “future demand” is actually standing in for.

The government has already told us that public interest can override private wishes — it demonstrated this on a bungalow. The consultants it commissioned have already told us that clearing the two forests carries the most severe ecological rating their framework allows.

What’s missing isn’t a legal equivalence between the two cases. What’s missing is the same willingness, applied to its own housing programme, to show the public the reasoning it was willing to act on without question at Oxley Road.

HDB’s feedback window on both sites closes 6 August. Until then, “publish the modelling” is not a rhetorical demand. It’s an address the public can still write to.

Submit for your online feedback to HDB for Gillman Barracks; Sunset Way.

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