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The Yaps will say goodbye to their College Green home today.
The family of five, and another six remaining families, have to vacate the estate off Dunearn Road by the end of this month to make way for new tenants.
Petitions by residents to stay on, and meetings with the relevant authorities over the past year, have been unsuccessful.
The 35,000 sq m estate contains 63 pre-war terrace homes which are owned by the Singapore Land Authority and managed by United Premas.
Come July, they will be leased to the National University of Singapore.
The units will be converted into hostels for about 240 overseas graduate students of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
'It's a great place for children to grow up in. They can roam about freely in nature, as children should,' said market researcher Yap Miew Leng, 32, who has lived there for two years.
About 60 per cent of the estate's residents are Singaporeans, while the rest come from countries such as Australia, the United States and Japan.
Model-actress Nadya Hutagalung and former Zouk marketing manager Tracy Phillips were once residents, along with lawyers, teachers and artists.
The Yaps' living room opens out onto a central basketball court and tennis court set amid lush greenery.
'At 5pm, almost all the estate's children come out to mingle. Toys such as plastic cars and slides are left in the middle and shared among the families. Nobody locks their doors and mothers often have to go from house to house looking for their kids at dinner time,' said Mrs Yap.
Halloween was the annual highlight for the community. Then, almost all the families would decorate their homes and the zinc-roofed walkways, and children would go round asking for candy.
The estate takes its name from the days when it was a hostel for University of Malaya students in 1952.
It was later renamed Dunearn Road Hostels before being rented out as private residences for between $1,800 and $2,000 a month.
'We were hoping maybe they would set aside at least some units for private use,' said Filipino hotel consultant and permanent resident Farhan Sharadji, 55, who lives there with his Singaporean wife and four children.
They will be moving to a landed property in Jurong next week.
Some residents have found similar black-and- white rental homes in Changi or Seletar, while others have moved back to their countries.
Mrs Yap will be uprooting her family to Beijing, where her husband studies, this week.
Several NUS students and academics started moving in late last year, residents observed.
With more movers and unfamiliar faces around, security has been compromised, said ex-physical education teacher Shahrudin Zainuddin, 35, who has lived there since 2007.
A break-in was reported earlier in the year while residents have also observed a growing rat problem.
The SLA said it tenanted the estate to NUS 'after careful consideration' and that all tenants were given at least six months' notice prior to the expiry of their tenancies, to give them time to make alternative arrangements.
Each unit will house about four students, according to a spokesman for the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
The units, sports facilities and multi-purpose hall will be refurbished at an estimated cost of more than $3.5 million.
Source : Sunday Times – 24 May 2009
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