“Homelessness exists in Singapore.” That’s the first thing that Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy Dr Ng Kok Hoe told me when we had a chance to discuss the topic. And it’s true. They are just less visible. It’s often difficult to distinguish a homeless person from any other member of the public, for a variety of reasons that we’ll get into. Dr Ng and his team issued a first of its kind report, “Homeless in Singapore: Results from a Nationwide Street Count,” in November of 2019. They estimated there were between 921 and 1,050 street homeless people in Singapore.

Since then, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has become a global problem. Singapore announced a stringent set of measures, called a “circuit breaker” on April 7th, 2020, designed to curb the spread of the virus. Singaporeans are urged to stay indoors whenever possible and access to public spaces are tightly controlled. This has complicated the homeless situation, as rough sleepers are urged to move to shelters that are struggling to cope with the situation. And as Dr Ng pointed out in a recent interview on Channel NewsAsia, many of Singapore’s homeless people have low-wage jobs in the retail and services industries, which have been some of the hardest hit by the pandemic.

This conversation was recorded on 15 October 2019: