The Plans Moved: More Greenery Will Be Kept at Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks

Mothership spoke to Holly Ngiam, 44, who came to Hong Lim Park with her three children, aged four, seven and ten.

Her reason was specific rather than abstract. Her in-laws live in an HDB flat near Maju Forest, and they chose that particular unit because they could look out at the forest — which, as she put it, is something rare these days.

She brought the children deliberately. “You may not know by looking at me, but we're Singaporeans. They're Singaporeans, and this is something that will impact their future. So it's important for us that they see the process and see that their voice can matter.”

Someone had recently told her it was not very nationalistic to oppose the housing plan. Her answer to Mothership was that “nationalism is caring enough about the future, that we speak up for what will matter — not just now, not just more houses and more people now, but what will matter in 20 years when they're raising their families.”

Ethan Wee, 14, told the same reporters he had never actually been into Maju Forest. He had only seen videos of it. He came anyway.

The rally is the louder half of the week's news, but the quieter half came first.

On 14 August, CNA reported that Minister of State for National Development Alvin Tan said the government will retain more greenery at both Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks than currently planned. Following public feedback, further adjustments will be made, and plans will be finalised “over the next month or so.” Residents living in the areas, CNA reported, welcomed the update.

For context on what “more” is being measured against: HDB's July proposal would clear at least 10 hectares of forest at Gillman Barracks for housing, and around two-thirds of Maju Forest is slated for redevelopment. Under the plans as they currently stand, Mothership reports that 40 per cent of the Gillman Barracks site and 35 per cent of Maju Forest are retained.

So the state of play is: a commitment to retain more, an existing baseline of 40 and 35 per cent, and no revised number. That gap is why 2,000 people still showed up.

SG Climate Rally set out three demands at Hong Lim Park, as reported by Mothership: protect nature areas, let the people decide, and redefine progress for all.

Underneath the framing, the first and third are value claims — a forest should be weighted more heavily, and nature parks should be permanently safeguarded rather than treated as land banks. The group called for ten nature areas identified as biodiversity-important in Our Wild Space 2.0, a report by the environmental group LepakInSG, to be upgraded to nature parks. Clementi-Maju and Alexandra Woodlands are on that list.

The second demand is different in kind, and it is the one most likely to outlive this particular fight. The group proposed making environmental impact assessments a legal requirement, carried out before plans are drawn up — arguing that the current process treats public feedback as, in their words, “a box to check.”

That is a procedural ask, not a site-specific one. And it is worth noticing that this month's events cut both ways as evidence for it: feedback demonstrably did change the plans, which undercuts the box-ticking charge — but it changed them after the plans existed and after months of petitions, dialogues and parliamentary questions, which is exactly the sequencing the demand objects to.

Here is where our own data can add something the coverage does not.

These are not remote patches of scrub. Maju Forest runs along Sunset Way, in the Clementi Park and Ulu Pandan area — District 21. Gillman Barracks sits off Alexandra Road on the Telok Blangah side, in District 4, right on the boundary with District 3; the private developments nearest to it are the ones along Depot Road and Telok Blangah Drive. Across the last twelve months of private transacted sales:

Look at the D04 row twice, because the two rankings disagree and the disagreement is the point. District 4 has the highest median transacted price of all 27 districts we can measure — $2.75M — while ranking only 19th by price per square foot.

A district can only be first on price and nineteenth on PSF if what people are buying there is space. These are large homes, set against water and greenery, on the slopes below Mount Faber. Nobody pays a $2.75M median for a compact unit at $1,809 per sqft; they pay it for a big one with something to look at.

And that is the uncomfortable symmetry of this whole dispute. The amenity that makes District 4 the most expensive district in Singapore by outright price is the same amenity the housing would be built on. Meanwhile District 21, along Sunset Way, sits 10th of 27 by PSF — a genuinely well-off, well-connected pocket of the west.

Which is why neither side here is being unreasonable. Land this central and this well-served is exactly where you want public housing, because it puts ordinary households somewhere they could not otherwise reach. It is also exactly where mature green space has become rarest, because everything around it was built on decades ago. The reason HDB wants these sites and the reason residents are defending them are the same reason.

The obvious next question is what the extra greenery costs in homes. We cannot answer it, and neither can anyone else outside HDB, because no official unit count has been published for either site.

That absence is doing a lot of quiet work in this debate. Without a unit figure, every party can argue in good faith and none can be checked: those defending the plans can say the housing need is large, those opposing can say the marginal homes are few, and no one has to produce a number.

We think the single most useful thing the government could publish alongside the finalised plans next month is not a percentage of green retained, but the unit count under the old plan and under the new one. A percentage of a site tells you about area. A unit count tells you what was actually traded away, and for whom.

Until then, treat anyone confidently telling you “this costs X flats” — in either direction — as guessing.

It is worth being straightforward about this, because cynicism is the cheap position and it does not fit the facts.

The plans changed. HDB released conceptual plans on 10 July with environmental and heritage reports. Those drew petitions, resident dialogues and an open letter, and at least 18 questions were filed for the 4 August parliamentary sitting — we covered that stage when it happened. On 14 August, a Minister of State said more greenery would be retained because of that feedback, and that plans would be finalised within about a month.

That is a real outcome, and it happened in roughly five weeks.

The fair criticism is not that feedback was ignored. It is about when feedback enters. On the current sequence, the public responds to a drawn plan; SG Climate Rally's proposal is that environmental assessment should come first and shape the plan before it is drawn. Workers' Party MP Dennis Tan, who attended the rally alongside Jamus Lim and Fadli Fawzi, told Mothership he hoped it would not be an end point but a beginning for more Singaporeans to speak up on green spaces.

Both things can be true: the process responded, and people would like it to respond earlier.

Speaking on 14 August 2026, Minister of State for National Development Alvin Tan said that following public feedback, further adjustments will be made and plans will be finalised “over the next month or so.” Read literally, that points to somewhere around September 2026.

He also said the government will continue to welcome feedback from the public in the meantime, which suggests the door is not shut while the adjustments are being made.

What has not been given is any detail of what the finalised plans will contain — no revised retention percentage, no unit count, no phasing. Treat the timing as an indication rather than a commitment; conceptual plans of this scale have slipped before.

Under the plans as they currently stand, Mothership reports that 35 per cent of Maju Forest and 40 per cent of the Gillman Barracks site are retained.

The underlying July proposal, as reported by CNA, would clear at least 10 hectares of forest at Gillman Barracks for housing, with around two-thirds of Maju Forest slated for redevelopment. When HDB released its conceptual plans in July, about 15 of Maju Forest's 23 hectares were proposed for public housing, with the remainder kept as wildlife refuges and ecological corridors.

Those are the pre-revision figures. The 14 August announcement is that more will be retained at both sites than that — but the revised figures have not been published, and will not be until plans are finalised.

The news — the ministerial statement, the retention percentages, the rally account, the three demands and all quotes come from CNA (14 August 2026) and Mothership (16 August 2026), linked below. The July plan details referenced here come from our own earlier commentary on HDB's conceptual plans and the 4 August parliamentary sitting.

The data — the district table is PropKaki's own cut of URA caveat data for private residential sales over a trailing twelve-month window as at 20 August 2026, covering 27 districts and 24,187 sales. PSF ranks are within those 27 districts. We use it here only to characterise how central and how expensive the surrounding areas are.

What we did not do — we did not estimate how many homes the extra greenery costs, or what a future flat on either site might price at. No unit count has been published, and inventing one from private resale data would be guesswork dressed as analysis.

The news:

• CNA — More greenery to be retained at Maju Forest, Gillman Barracks following public feedback, 14 August 2026.
• Mothership — Over 2,000 people turn up at Hong Lim Park over Maju Forest & Gillman Barracks plans, 16 August 2026.

The data:

• PropKaki's cut of URA caveat data — private residential transacted prices by postal district, trailing 12 months to 20 August 2026.

Our earlier commentary:

• “Nothing Is Cast in Stone” — and Suddenly the Flats in Clementi Are a Question Again, 4 August 2026.

This is commentary by the PropKaki Editorial Desk on reporting by CNA and Mothership. The ministerial statement, the rally account and the quotes belong to those newsrooms; the price analysis, the framing and the opinions are ours.

It is opinion and general information, not property or investment advice. The plans described are not final — a revision has been announced but not quantified, and finalised plans were said on 14 August to be about a month away. No unit count has been published for either site. Anyone whose decision turns on the outcome should work from HDB's and URA's own published materials once released.

Published 20 August 2026.