A president in Yishun: Halimah Yacob and the jumbo HDB flat

When Halimah Yacob was elected President of Singapore in September 2017 — the nation's first woman head of state, and its first Malay president in nearly half a century, chosen in a walkover reserved for Malay candidates — the spotlight swung, improbably, onto a Housing Board flat in Yishun. The former Speaker of Parliament lived not in a colonial bungalow but in a jumbo HDB unit at Block 663 Yishun Avenue 4, two flats knocked into one, and she made a point of staying put in the heartland even as she assumed the highest office in the land.

The arrangement charmed the country and earned the block a nickname that stuck: netizens dubbed the unassuming slab the "Yistana", a play on Yishun and the Istana, the official presidential residence she was entitled to occupy. For a town whose name is usually a punchline, having the President as a neighbour was a rare and genuinely proud claim to fame — residents pointed out her corridor, and the flat became a small local landmark.

It also raised a question the estate had never faced: whether a serving head of state could remain in an open public-housing block, and what round-the-clock security that would demand of a shared void deck and lift lobby. Madam Halimah eventually moved out for those reasons, but for a while Yishun could say, without a trace of irony, that the President lived just upstairs.

• 13 Sept 2017straitstimes.com