SINGAPORE: HDB reached a milestone in its 50 year history on Sunday, with the completion of its one millionth flat.
The unit is located at the new TreeLodge@Punggol and on Sunday, the keys were handed over to the homeowners - Mr Wang Weiji and his wife Ms Christina Ng.
Speaking at the event DPM Teo Chee Hean, who is also MP for Pasir Ris Punggol GRC, noted that HDB has moved from providing low cost rental housing to building homes for ownership.
And along the way it has also picked up several international accolades.
This year in Punggol alone, HDB launched 3,300 new flats through its build to order programme and will launch another project with 1,000 new flats in the next few days.
HDB said its demand remains strong. It is on track to complete 35,000 flats in Punggol by end 2015.
As the United States and China battle over the finer points of currency manipulation at the G-20 summit, American negotiators may want to take note of this startling testimonial to the productivity of Chinese workers: A construction crew in the south-central Chinese city of Changsha has completed a 15-story hotel in just six days. If nothing else, this remarkable achievement will stoke further complaints from American economic pundits that China’s economy is far more accomplished than ours in tending to such basics as construction.
Meanwhile, it’s easy to imagine the disorientation of Changsha residents who’d gone away, or who just hadn’t recently ventured into the downtown neighborhood of the new Ark Hotel: “Honey, I don’t remember a hotel there, do you?”
The work crew erected the hotel — a soundproofed, thermal-insulated structure reportedly built to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake — with all prefabricated materials. In other words, a crew of off-site factory workers built the sections, and their on-site counterparts arranged them on the foundation for the Ark project.
Despite the frenetic pace of construction, no workers were injured — and thanks to the prefab nature of the process, the builders wasted very few construction materials. Below is a time-lapse video that shows the hotel being built from the ground up in less than a week:
