You forgot the quotes around "benevolent". It's "benevolent" to those who conform to what the state wishes to present as their archetype. Meanwhile, migrant wor

You forgot the quotes around "benevolent". It's "benevolent" to those who conform to what the state wishes to present as their archetype. Meanwhile, migrant workers are effectively indentured servants and prop up, mostly out of sight, the country in a manner not dissimilar to Qatar or Bahrain or certain sectors of the US. If public housing needs second class citizens in order for it to work, it's not worth it. One might as well as cite the excise-farming era of Singapore between Raffles and Clementi Smith as the actual golden age upon which the modern prosperity was founded, but it doesn't fit the official narrative of course. During this time, there was "public housing", but not run by the de jure government but the de facto native-place associations that the administrators, who had next to no knowledge of the local languages, called secret societies. They are in fact akin to Landsmanshaft in the Yiddish tradition. Everything since then requires a lot of qualification just to peel back the revisionism and certainly does not serve as a good example unless one thinks second class citizenship is worth the perceived order and functionality the nation projects to the world.