AGEING IN PLACE: A SOLUTION TO SINGAPORE ELDERLY CARE

Abstract

Elderly care problem has been plaguing policymakers for many years as governments worldwide move towards implementing models to support “Age-in-place”, in turn, as a response to managing the large greying population coming to age from the baby boomer generation. In Singapore, tension between the public housing development board and existing neighbourhood residents are splashed on newspapers headlines whenever a new studio apartment is planned for an existing housing district. However, the Singapore government have been quick to explore new model termed “elderly retirement villages”, beginning with Kampung Admiralty as its pilot project. Through interviewing key appointment holders of the project, including a focus group study (n=52) of the elderly residents, and a public survey (n=207) of the visitors to Kampung Admiralty, the results are evident that KA is very successful in its goal of meeting the elderly’s needs for age-in-place. Further evaluations are made on the current outcome of the project in various aspects of meeting the elderly needs and its attractiveness to the general public as a proxy measurement towards assessing the effects of the model on reducing NIMBY for elderly focused developments. Case in point, Kampung Admiralty requires further effort to ensure continuous engagement with the elderly. While the overall attraction to general public is improved but it remains to see if actual sentiments have changed. In addition, debates on the sustainability of the $150 million-dollar village model remains a key concern. Nonetheless, on scalability, it is concluded that a lite-model of Kampung Admiralty can be considered for future developments in other neighbourhoods. Keywords: Age-in-place, Public Housing, Studio Apartments, Mix-use development, Elderly retirement village, Community, Not-In-My-Backyard (“NIMBY”)