The rapid growth of Singapore at the turn of the century produced slums in the central city area. In 1918, the Colonial Administration set up a Housing Commission to study the housing problem in the central area. The Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) was set up in 1927 as a result of this study.
The SIT was given the mandate to house the homeless in Singapore. It was empowered to plan roads, regulate sanitary conditions of buildings and draw up schemes for land acquisition. The SIT was however, not given the authority to carry out large-scale housing construction. As a result, it only completed 23,000 units of flats in its 32 years of existence.
