John: 214,000 housing applicants
No Land to Build
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Yvonne Baboolal (T&T Guardian).
There is a crushing need for Housing Development Corporation (HDC) houses, with 214,000 applications in, but there is little or no state land available to construct new houses at this time, HDC managing director Jearlean John says. John made the disclosure at a Joint Select Committee (JSC) meeting in Parliament yesterday. “The need for housing is a crushing one. There are 214,000 persons applying for houses,” John told the JSC meeting.
She said the application numbers had reached such proportions because the HDC had moved beyond its original mandate of merely providing housing for low-income earners because of a new dynamic among the population. “We are now providing houses for middle and sometimes high-income earners. There are professionals who, sometimes with joint incomes, cannot afford to buy houses in the private sector.”
John, HDC chairman Rabindra Moonan and other corporation officials appeared before the JSC yesterday to give an account of how they were running the state entity. Responding to a question on the issue of land availability for projects, John said, “There is no land available for housing at this time. “I have been out with the Commissioner of State Lands and he said there is little or no land...The majority of state land has been allocated to farmers,” she said.
Squatters are also occupying some of the state land. Noting, for example, that the HDC has been involved in a wrangle with squatters over Pineapple Smith Lands in D’Abadie, John said to date they had not been able to access that state property for housing. She said there was also a major demand for single-unit houses. “No one wants an apartment. Everyone wants a house with a backyard, but because of the shortage of land this culture will have to change.”
Asked how the HDC determined where houses were to be located, Peter Forde, consultant project adviser, said this does not take much work because of the significant shortage of land. He said there is a big demand for houses on the East-West Corridor and in the West, but there is a shortage of land for housing in these areas.
John also said while people may see “naked windows” in HDC houses around the country and think they are unoccupied, they are, in fact, “not unallocated.” She said there are more than 2,000 nearing completion. However, John said another 465 houses done by contractors had to be suspended and retendered.
When the Government assumed power, John said, it met 4,768 units which had been substantially completed but could not be allocated because they did not have the necessary amenities, like potable water and wastewater plants. A number of other units also had to be rescoped because they were vandalised.
People’s National Movement Port-of-Spain North/St Ann’s West MP Patricia McIntosh wanted to know why the “look and feel” of the Victoria Keys and Chaconia Crescent projects in her constituency had to be changed. John said there were garbage chutes in front the houses, for instance, which did not add to the aesthetics of the development.
