Los Angeles wouldn’t be the first city to turn to public housing after a tragic fire. When a catastrophic conflagration in Singapore razed an entire central neighborhood to the ground, the hyper-capitalist city-state placed a new dream of public housing for all at the heart of its rebuilding efforts.

The fire, which took place in the spring of 1961, destroyed the homes of sixteen thousand people in Singapore’s Bukit Ho Swee neighborhood. The cause of the fire remains unclear, with some claiming it was arson. Within a day of the fire, as Kah Seng Loh recounts in his book Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore, the city-state’s Housing Development Board (HDB) announced a resettlement plan that marked the start of Singapore’s first mass public housing project. Some six thousand Bukit Ho Swee fire victims were rehoused within ten days in existing public housing units in neighboring areas; by February 1962 — just nine months after the fire — all those displaced were rehoused, largely in one-room government-built rental apartments a stone’s throw from their previous homes.

In Chua Beng Huat’s 1997 book Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore, the Singaporean sociologist — who lost his childhood home in the Bukit Ho Swee fire — describes how the aftermath of the tragedy revealed one of the keys to HDB’s success. As a response to the incident, the country’s Legislative Assembly quickly passed an amendment to the colonial Land Acquisition Ordinance of 1920 that allowed the government, ruled by Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP), to quickly purchase land from landowners in Bukit Ho Swee. The move would become the precursor to the 1966 Land Acquisition Act, the law that Chua and others argue is at the very core of Singapore’s public housing transformation.

“The 1966 Land Acquisition Act empowers the government to acquire any land that is deemed necessary in the interest of national development,” Chua writes. A 1973 amendment, he explains, allowed the government to buy land at low market rates. The fixed 1973 values were not adjusted again until 1986, when, Chua argues, “the government deemed it had already sufficient land banked for development purposes.” By 2005, the state owned 90 percent of Singapore’s entire land mass of 283.8 square miles.

Aside from laying the groundwork for further land acquisition, the Bukit Ho Swee rehousing project revealed another key to HDB’s success: the institution proved it could build swiftly and affordably to meet demand. In the nine months after the fire, HDB built five apartment blocks containing a total of 768 homes; in the following six years, it built around 12,000 apartments on the site of the former Bukit Ho Swee village. For the most part, the apartments were relatively basic, but they were built with modern plumbing and electricity — a novelty for many former traditional kampong village dwellers. From 1960 to 1963, HDB built more than thirty thousand apartments, proving it could develop and deliver housing at previously unseen speeds.

Around this time, in 1964, the PAP-led government decided to start offering HDB apartments for sale and began to view public housing no longer as rented social housing for Singapore’s poorest citizens, but rather as a means to ensure that all Singaporeans could live in well-built homes. HDB speculated that homeownership, as opposed to renting, would “stake” citizens into their homes — and by extension into a nascent Singaporean nation. Legislation introduced in the late 1960s eventually allowed citizens to tap into mandatory pension savings accounts to purchase HDB units on public land leased to apartment owners, unleashing the financial potential of its own residents to pay for a mass mixed-income public housing building drive that continues to this day.

Once a collection of shophouses, kampongs, and informal settlements with no running water or electricity, Singapore has transformed into a metropolis with over a million HDB units housing a population that’s more than tripled since the Bukit Ho Swee fire. Today 80 percent of the approximately 4.1 million Singaporean citizens and permanent residents live in high-quality HDB high-rises. Families from all income brackets and a variety of cultural backgrounds thrive in vibrant neighborhoods offering numerous public and commercial services designed with communities’ needs in mind. With less than 0.2 percent of the population unhoused, homelessness has essentially been eradicated, and housing has become an unwritten right. What’s more, HDB housing is actually extremely popular in Singapore, where the unfortunate stigma attached to public housing has been entirely lifted.

Just like Singapore once did, Los Angeles could put public housing at the heart of its fire recovery plans. In a rental market where prices continue to reach disturbing new highs, the city should build, buy, or even requisition (as Meagan Day has proposed in Jacobin) thousands of units. These initiatives would provide much-needed relief to middle- and low-income Angelenos displaced by the fires and those indirectly impacted by them through rent hikes — not to mention the seventy thousand Angelenos who were already unhoused prior to the disaster. Once some of the fire evacuees are able to rebuild their homes, their city-owned units could continue to house Angelenos from a wide range of incomes in order to meaningfully address the city’s notorious housing crisis once and for all.

Unfortunately, the story of public housing in Los Angeles, as in other parts of the United States, is fraught. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), one of the oldest public housing authorities in the United States, was founded in the waning days of the Great Depression, during which the federal government laid the first bricks in a far-reaching affordable housing drive that would hit its peak post–World War II. Los Angeles’s public housing hopes were, however, nearly immediately disrupted in the 1950s, when real estate interests led what tenant lawyer Jacob Woocher calls “a hysterical anti-communist campaign” that ultimately saw the city’s federal contract to build ten thousand housing units scrapped. In the decades that followed, the Red Scare put an end to the city’s broader public housing building efforts with more fearmongering about communism.

Then, in the 1990s, as Woocher writes, another “war on public housing” led to the ongoing demolition of thousands of the 8,264 units still standing in 1995. Today HACLA rents out a meager 6,300 units throughout Los Angeles to 19,000 low-income families and individuals whose rental rates are based on a percentage of their income. In a population of nearly 10 million, with a shortage of 521,596 affordable homes prior to the fires, that’s hardly a drop in LA’s drought-stricken bucket.

While Los Angeles can learn a great deal from Singapore’s bold housing experiment, some of the answers are closer at hand — the city already meets several conditions that it could simply expand on. For starters, it can already count on HACLA, a publicly owned institution somewhat akin to Singapore’s Housing Development Board, to run public housing units throughout the city. And, although it could of course buy more vacant units and land, the city already owns thousands of vacant lots that it wants to redevelop for “starter homes.” Frustratingly, as is too often the case in the United States, Mayor Bass announced in March that the city was looking to sell these lots to private developers — the exact opposite of what Singapore does through its long-term land lease system.

When it comes to funding a desperately needed public housing building and buying spree, the city’s United to House Los Angeles (ULA) tax, known as the “mansion tax,” was passed in 2023 to bankroll affordable housing initiatives with money collected through a 4–5.5 percent tax on property sales over $5.3 million. The relatively new tax has already raised millions of dollars. Those funds have gone toward several important initiatives, including efforts to protect Angelenos displaced by the recent fires from price-gouging and other abuses. And yet, so far, none of the ULA tax funding has gone directly to HACLA for new city-owned units.

At a state level, at least one policymaker has been paying attention to the Singapore model. Assemblymember Alex Lee, chair of the California Assembly’s Select Committee on Social Housing, became the first California legislator to introduce a social housing policy with the Social Housing Act (AB309). The bill, which was passed in 2023 (only to be vetoed by Governor Newsom at the final hurdle), would establish a state authority (not unlike Singapore’s HDB) to build mixed-income social housing on state-owned land throughout California. Lee reintroduced the bill at the end of 2024, mere weeks before the January wildfires, but it remains to be seen whether it will become law or be vetoed yet again.

Los Angeles already has plenty of tools at its disposal to dramatically increase its public housing supply. An ambitious, strategically timed social housing effort could redefine “public housing” for Angelenos, just as Singapore’s did after the Bukit Ho Swee fire. Even before their respective fires, neither city’s housing provisions were meeting its residents’ basic needs for shelter. Instead of placing Band-Aids on a decades-long crisis, Los Angeles can and should finally do better by its residents. Singapore is proof that it’s possible.