Today is the day. HDB’s feedback form closes at 6pm.
More than 38,000 of you have signed. Thank you — sincerely. But today is the day a signature stops being the thing that counts and the form starts.
Here is the math that has decided this before. Dover Forest, 2021: over 50,000 signatures, and roughly 1,800 people who also filled in HDB’s official form. The biodiversity-rich western half was retained, its review deferred by about a decade. Tengah: the same official window drew sixteen responses in total. Tengah is gone.
Sunset Way has passed 2,700 official submissions. That is already more than Dover received. Every one added before six o’clock joins a number HDB will publish and that Members of Parliament can stand up and cite.
Three things, in order of how much they matter:
1. HDB’s form, before 6pm. Link
2. Email your MP. Not only Ulu Pandan and Bukit Timah. Link
3. Send this to one person who has walked the old railway line.
Full transparency: the letter I sent Mr Christopher de Souza
Some of you have asked what is actually being said to MPs away from the public posts. In a campaign that has spent four weeks asking for transparency, that should never be a mystery. So here it is in full — unedited, minus my contact details.
5 August 2026
Dear Mr de Souza,
I write as a resident of Sunset Way, and as one of the many people who have spent the past four weeks reading reports we never expected to read, at hours we never expected to be awake.
I am submitting this letter as official feedback on the eve of the consultation's close, and publishing it openly, because the questions in it belong to more than one household.
I want to begin with thanks for what you have already done, and then to ask for a few specific things in the weeks ahead.
You did not have to file two Parliamentary Questions and an Adjournment Motion. You did not have to hold a town hall with 131 residents alongside the agencies, walk the forest twice, or submit a further 65 residents' letters to HDB on our behalf. You did, and residents noticed. On 4 August you were also one of the few Members who came to the Chamber with alternatives rather than objections. That is the register in which this ought to be settled, and I hope this letter matches it.
What these four weeks have shown
None of us expected this. A petition begun by one resident has passed 38,500 verified signatures as of 5 August, and HDB had already received 2,712 written submissions on Sunset Way by 28 July — more than the roughly 1,800 that changed the outcome at Dover Forest in 2021. Nineteen Members of Parliament, on both sides of the House, filed questions. Nature guides, birdwatchers, doctors, teachers, retirees, hikers and people who had never heard of this forest in June have all written in their own words.
The part that has stayed with me is the children.
A preschool's K2 class wrote to the Prime Minister with a question I have not been able to improve on: can people and nature live together? Four young residents prepared a script and their own drawings and brought them to a Meet-the-People Session. And at half past two on the morning of 4 August, a photograph of two small children holding a placard — please save the forest — reached the Minister of State as he prepared for the sitting, and he spoke about it from the floor that afternoon.
We teach these children active citizenship. They have now practised it, carefully and politely, exactly as taught. What happens next is the lesson.
Where the 4 August sitting left us
The Minister of State was clear that both sites are zoned residential and that the Government will proceed, but that how we build matters. Whatever any of us hoped for, that is the ground we now stand on — and it is not nothing. Fewer homes have already been designed in to retain green and heritage areas and a response report will be published. The engagement continues past 6 August.
But a great deal was left open. On the Dover precedent you raised, you received an acknowledgement of your advocacy rather than a commitment. Clementi Avenue 5 was confirmed as a future housing site once the Cross Island Line works are done, with no timeline given. And the questions that would let residents judge the trade-off honestly went unanswered: what a major negative biodiversity finding after mitigation actually triggers; what would cause a site to be avoided altogether, and what minimum habitat size is being optimised for; the site-specific urban heat modelling results; the population and household-formation projections driving these two sites; and whether MSE formally assessed the climate-adaptation consequences of removing roughly 25 hectares of mature canopy in the Year of Climate Adaptation.
What I would ask of you
- Deliver the Adjournment Motion, and re-file it if the ballot does not fall our way.It remains the only forum in which the Ministry must answer on the record and at length.
- Ask for the number. The Master Plan publishes indicative yields for Newton, Paterson and Bayshore. None is published for Sunset Way. Until the projected yield for this parcel is public, no resident can argue the trade-off and no agency can be held to it. Please press for it to be published, with the demand projections behind it, before any tender is called.
- Ask for the Dover outcome by name, not by analogy. At Dover, the ecologically richer half was retained and its review deferred to around 2030. That is an instrument, not a sentiment. Please ask for it here: retain the richest portion of the 15 hectares, defer its review by a stated number of years, and let NParks' ecological data draw the boundary.
- Ask for sequencing and phasing, not only mitigation. If Clementi Avenue 5 is coming regardless, ask for its timeline and for the Sunset Way footprint to be reduced by whatever it yields. And ask that clearance be phased against committed launches, with published review checkpoints — as is being considered at Gillman — so that no hectare falls before the homes it is meant to hold are actually committed.
- Ask for the consultation window in writing. Continued stakeholder engagement is welcome. An extended formal consultation period, as was granted at Dover, is a different thing. It would help enormously to have the distinction confirmed in writing.
On the homes themselves: making the reason the rule
I want to be plain about this. The Members who spoke of young families wanting to live near their parents are not wrong, and I do not oppose these flats. My own neighbours' children cannot find a flat near Sunset Way, and that is a real hardship, not a rhetorical one.
But if proximity to parents is the justification for clearing a forest, let it also govern who receives the flats. At present, any eligible applicant may ballot regardless of where their parents live. That gap is what turns a good reason into a general one. I would ask you to put five guidelines to HDB and MND for this project:
- Make proximity a condition, not a preference. Reserve the large majority of units — I would suggest 80 per cent — for applicants with a parent or married child living within HDB's existing proximity radius, verified at application rather than merely given ballot weight.
- Let the priority survive the ballot.Unallocated proximity units should be re-offered to qualifying applicants in a second exercise before being opened to general demand.
- Protect the intent at resale. Apply a longer minimum occupation period to proximity units, or restrict their first resale to buyers who also qualify, so the flats stay with the need that justified them.
- Publish the outcome. After selection, publish the proportion of successful applicants who genuinely had a parent nearby. If that proportion is low, the stated reason was not the operative one, and the later phases should be reconsidered before more forest is cleared.
- Size the project to the verified need, and do not pass the hilly terrain's construction premium to the buyer. If proximity demand in Ulu Pandan and Clementi proves smaller than the current footprint assumes, reduce the footprint rather than fill the flats with general demand.
None of this asks HDB to build fewer homes for the people who need them. It asks that the homes go to the people whose need was used to justify the land.
One last observation, offered respectfully
The Minister of State noted that Maju was a brownfield site in 1976, and that many of our thriving estates began the same way. That is true, and it is a fitting reminder of how far we've come as a nation, especially as we celebrate our nation's 61st birthday in just a few days.
I would gently offer the other half of it. Very little of what Singapore now protects began life protected — and some of it was protected, lost, and protected again. Sungei Buloh was a forest reserve in 1890, struck off the list in 1938, and by the mid-1980s was prawn ponds slated for agro-farms and birdwatchers found it in 1986, and it was gazetted a wetland reserve in 2002. Dairy Farm Nature Park was a pepper and gambier clearing, then a pig farm, then a dairy, then two quarries. The flanks of Bukit Timah were logged and quarried. Kranji Marshes did not exist until a dam accidentally made it in the 1970s, and the first proposal to conserve it was turned down. The Rail Corridor was a working railway. Chek Jawa was days from reclamation in 2001 and survives on a reprieve rather than a gazette. Khatib Bongsu, once designated for prawn farming, is becoming a nature park now. Tanjong Pagar Railway Station was made a National Monument in April 2011, three months before its last train — protected while it was still working. And Tiong Bahru was not on URA's 2002 conservation list at all and it went on only after the public said it should, and until then they were simply old flats.
If a site's origin decided its fate, Singapore would have very few nature reserves and very little conserved architecture. What we are actually asked to judge is not what Maju was in 1976, but what it has become by 2026 — and on that, the Government's own assessment answers plainly: 113 animal species recorded, two Critically Endangered species documented, and a biodiversity impact rated major negative after mitigation. Fifty years of undisturbed regeneration is not a technicality to be discounted. It is the rarest thing on this island: time that cannot be bought back, and cannot be replanted.
In closing
Thank you for taking this seriously when it would have been easier not to. Thank you also, if you will permit me, on behalf of everyone who has spent these four weeks writing, walking, drawing, explaining and asking politely — the retirees and the birdwatchers, the neighbours and the strangers, the teachers, the guides, and above all the children, who rallied behind a forest that cannot attend a consultation, cannot fill in a form, and cannot speak for itself.
The plans are not final. That is not a consolation and it is the reason this letter is worth writing. Whatever is decided, I hope it is decided in a way we can explain to the K2 class that wrote to the Prime Minister — and to the generations who may never walk the old railway line at dawn and hear what those before them heard.
Yours sincerely,
Raymond Ong
Majulah Singapura
And that’s it
That is everything I have said to your MP. No private version, no separate ask.
Four weeks ago, this was one resident, hoping a few more people might notice a forest before it was too late. Since then, strangers have become a community, and a community has become something close to family. A preschool wrote to the Prime Minister. Children brought drawings to Meet-the-People Sessions. Nineteen MPs filed questions. And more than 2,700 people — most with nothing personally at stake — gave their time anyway, simply because someone asked, and someone else listened.
Whatever is decided about the fifteen hectares — let it be decided with yours in the room.
6pm is the deadline. We can do this 🌳
For the forest
the Save Maju Forest petition
IG: @savemajuforest