View from sidewalk
It took several months of passing by the stacked shipping containers between my apartment and the neighboring construction site to realize something.
People live in them. Piled three levels high.
A closer inspection reveals all the normal associations of home. Laundry drying on the front porch. A sportscast glowing from the television. Dinner cooking, filling the air with delicious curry aromas.
Everything you’d expect from home. Except for living in a dirty shipping container with several other guys right next to a construction site stocked with heavy-duty equipment!
Not the typical, idealistic American middle-class home with a white picket fence, that’s for sure.
Far from it.
In clean, almost sterile, Singapore these living conditions feel out of place. It doesn’t fit the stereotype. But, it must be tolerated in the name of progress.
Often the entire city seems to be under construction and that can get expensive. So concessions must be made.
View from above
In fact, the average Singapore boom-town construction worker makes less than USD 16-18 a day. That’s less than 5000 dollars a year.
Contrast that to the expensive high-rise condo they are building, where a single unit could sell for as much as USD 2 million.
Assuming 100 workers are employed for an entire year, that total cost only equates to under half a million dollars.
Not bad for the developers if the project nets 200+ units.
Someone is making a killing. And, it’s not the workers.
