Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks: Fewer Homes Is Now the Stated Price of Keeping the Trees

The state has put the housing-versus-greenery trade-off on the record for two named sites — and the Dover Forest precedent shows exactly how that compromise plays out for buyers.

On Aug 16, nature lovers and activists filled Hong Lim Park to ask the authorities a narrow question: what exactly went into the decision to build housing on parts of Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks. Two days earlier, Minister of State for National Development Alvin Tan had already conceded the arithmetic — more greenery will be kept on both sites, and that means fewer homes can be built there.

The trade-off is no longer implied. It has been stated.

The sequence matters. On Aug 4, Mr Tan told Parliament that forested areas in Gillman Barracks and at Sunset Way, near Maju Forest, need to be developed to meet Singapore's housing needs over the next decade. On Aug 14, he said more green space would be retained at both — with the explicit caveat that fewer homes follow.

Then came the rally, organised by SG Climate Rally: postcard-writing booths, sign painting, poems read between speeches, a mass singalong to close. Members of various opposition parties were present. The stated ask was not reversal. It was disclosure — more information on the forested land earmarked for housing, and on the factors weighed in the decision.

That is a meaningfully different fight from 2021. The question has moved from "will you build here?" to "show us the workings." For anyone buying property near a green edge in Singapore, the workings are the whole story.

What 40 per cent and 35 per cent actually mean

Earlier plans for the two sites — themselves drawn up with input from nature groups — sought to retain 40 per cent of green space at Gillman Barracks and 35 per cent at Maju Forest. Mr Tan's Aug 14 remarks indicate more will now be kept than those figures.

Maju Forest runs to roughly 23 hectares. A 35 per cent retention target is therefore on the order of eight hectares of forest kept — and the new position pushes above that. Gillman Barracks, in District 4 on the Greater Southern Waterfront's flank, carries both environmental and heritage considerations, which is why studies there triggered public feedback sessions before anything was settled.

What has not been put on the public record, in either the Aug 4 or Aug 14 statements, is a unit number for either site. No yield, no housing type, no timeline. The honest read is that the retention percentages moved first and the housing figures are being recalculated behind them.

The state has now priced greenery in units rather than dollars. Every additional hectare retained at Maju Forest or Gillman Barracks is a subtraction from the housing supply of two of Singapore's most accessible planning areas — and that subtraction lands on ballot odds long before it lands on any price index.

Dover Forest is the template, and it took a decade to play out

Nothing about the Maju–Gillman outcome is novel. It is the Ulu Pandan playbook, run again.

Dover Forest was a 33-hectare parcel zoned Residential in the URA Master Plan since 2003. An Environmental Baseline Study identified 158 animal species. After advocacy from the Nature Society (Singapore) and more than 50,000 petition signatories, MND and HDB revised the plan in July 2021: the western portion — roughly 22 hectares — was safeguarded as a nature park and connector within the Clementi Nature Corridor, with development deferred until at least the 2030s. The eastern half, about 11 hectares, went to phased public housing yielding around 3,000 BTO units, with dedicated greenery and a linear park buffer along the Sungei Ulu Pandan Canal.

Then the flats came, on the developable half, over years: Ulu Pandan Banks (November 2022, about 1,330 units), Ulu Pandan Glades (February 2023, about 732 units) and Ulu Pandan Vista (November 2023, about 890 units) — all 99-year leasehold under the Prime Location Housing model.

The same structure repeated at the former Keppel Club, where roughly 20 per cent of the 48-hectare site — some nine to 10 hectares — was carved out for green corridors, coastal buffers and open parks after baseline studies on the adjacent Berlayer Creek mangroves. The remainder still accommodates about 7,000 public flats and 3,000 private units, with Berlayar Residences the inaugural BTO project there. At Tengah, HDB threaded a 100-metre-wide, five-kilometre-long forest corridor through a 700-hectare new town planned for some 42,000 homes.

Advocacy in Singapore rarely stops a development. It reshapes it — narrower footprint, wider buffer, longer runway — and then the cranes arrive anyway.

The green premium is real. It accrues to what's already standing.

Research from NUS and NParks indicates resale flats near established tree canopy command higher price premiums than those facing bare grass plots. Developers know it, and price accordingly.

Pinetree Hill, on Pine Grove Parcel A near the Ulu Pandan green network, is the cleanest local benchmark. The land was awarded at $1,318 psf ppr — $671.5 million — and the 520-unit project launched in July 2023 with sales averaging roughly $2,412 to $2,500 psf and highs above $2,760 psf. In Tengah, the executive condominium sequence tracked the same logic: Copen Grand launched at an average $1,338 psf in October 2022 off a $603 psf ppr land bid and sold out inside a month; Lumina Grand followed in January 2024 at $1,464 psf; Novo Place's 504 units transacted at indicative pricing of $1,488 to $1,560 psf in late 2024.

Note what those numbers do and don't prove. They show buyers pay up for proximity to protected green structure — a gazetted corridor, a nature park, a canal-side linear buffer. They say nothing about a forested plot that merely happens to be undeveloped today.

The mirage: unbuilt is not unbuildable

This is where money is actually lost. Clementi Forest runs to roughly 85 hectares and has been zoned "Residential (Subject to Detailed Planning)" since the 1998 Master Plan. After the 2020–2021 public campaign, MND and URA said there was no immediate need for residential development in the medium term, and the area was folded into the wider Clementi Nature Corridor. The statutory zoning did not change. It remains residential, for a future generation to decide.

That is the trap in a single example. A parcel can be celebrated as a conservation win, be functionally protected for years, and still sit on the Master Plan as buildable land. Anyone paying a premium for an "unblocked forest view" is underwriting a zoning code, not a tree line.

Three checks are non-negotiable before signing:

• Verify the land-use code on URA SPACE. Only Park, Open Space or Nature Reserve designations offer real durability. Reserve Site and Residential (Subject to Detailed Planning) are placeholders, not promises.
• Check whether the greenery sits inside a statutory nature corridor. The Clementi, Khatib and Kranji corridors establish linear buffers with far more permanence than an unzoned patch of secondary regrowth.
• Read the environmental studies, not the brochure. Environmental Baseline Studies and Environmental Impact Assessments are now published for feedback before rezoning or clearing — Dover, Maju and Gillman Barracks all went through the process. Those documents are the earliest reliable signal that a plot is moving.

Fewer homes here won't move the index. It will move the ballot.

Zoom out and the supply picture is not tight. URA's Confirmed List for the first half of 2026 held roughly 4,575 to 4,600 private residential units, around 50 per cent above the 10-year historical average. HDB is targeting more than 50,000 new flats across 2025 to 2027. And over 13,000 flats reach their Minimum Occupation Period in 2026, up from roughly 7,000 to 8,000 in 2025, feeding the resale pool.

Prices reflect that. Private home price growth moderated to a 0.4 to 0.9 per cent quarterly pace in the first half of 2026, following a modest full-year gain of about 3.3 per cent in 2025. HDB resale prices eased slightly, between -0.1 and -0.3 per cent quarter on quarter. With ABSD at 60 per cent for foreigners and 20 per cent for citizens buying a second property, a four-year SSD clock on post-July 2025 purchases, and a 55 per cent TDSR cap, demand is overwhelmingly owner-occupier. Mortgage rates in the 2.80 to 3.40 per cent band have helped sentiment without reviving leverage.

So a few hundred units shaved off Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks will not register in any national index. What it does is concentrate. Both sites sit in high-demand, well-connected locations — Clementi and Sunset Way on one side, the southern city fringe on the other. Trimming yield there raises BTO application rates for the flats that do get built and pushes displaced demand into surrounding resale stock. Scarcity that is created by policy in a specific postcode is still scarcity.

What to watch next

The useful signals are procedural, not promotional. Watch for the revised retention figures for both sites to be published with the reasoning attached — that is precisely what the Hong Lim Park crowd asked for, and it is also what determines developable area. Watch the EIA and public consultation releases for the Maju and Sunset Way fringes and for Gillman Barracks. Watch the semi-annual GLS Confirmed and Reserve lists, and the BTO pipeline, for parcels adjacent to anything you own or intend to buy.

And hold two ideas at once. The compromise model — study, consult, carve out, build the remainder — is now institutionalised, which means green advocacy in Singapore delays and reshapes far more often than it prevents. It also means the state has accepted a real cost in homes to keep forest standing. The Aug 14 admission was not a concession under pressure. It was a price list.

Buyers should read it that way. The greenery you can count on is the greenery someone has already paid for in units.