Homeless families sue HDC

An attorney, who witnessed the spectacle of young children trembling from the cold under a tarpaulin during early morning showers yesterday, wrote up documents and rushed to the San Fernando High Court to file a judicial review lawsuit against Minister of Housing Randall Mitchell.

The lawsuit seeks the court’s direction to the Housing Development Authority (HDC) to at least instruct the San Fernando City Corporation to allow these families permission to occupy the San Fernando Centre for the Displaced.

The families were evicted last month from several apartments in an HDC housing development at Harmony Hall where the buildings containing the apartments were several years ago, deemed unsafe for human habitation.

Allison Dick, Malika Lewis, the Martin and Phillips families have been living on the road outside the Harmony Hall HDC development which is a few meters from the Gasparillo junction. The apartment complex was deemed unfit in 2012, and as a result, occupants were relocated. Several other families then moved into the vacant apartments.

Attorney Cherry Ann Rajkumar filed the judicial review application in which she stated that at 4.20 am yesterday, there was continuous rainfall which made life unbearable for the evicted families. According to court documents filed, Dick informed the attorney that her children got wet and have fallen ill.

Rajkumar named the parties to the lawsuit as the ‘Asphalt Pitch Pavement Dwellers’ of Harmony Hall who are seeking judicial review against refusal of the Minister of Housing Randall Mitchell, to perform his statutory duty to properly direct the HDC board regarding shelter for the applicants.

At the very least, the lawsuit contends, the HDC should provide emergency shelter to the displaced residents. The attorney stated in the application that she first heard about the plight of the applicants when she read in the newspapers, that 25 families among them babies, were evicted and have since been living on the unsheltered steps of the HDC complex, the corridors of the building and lately, the roadside under makeshift tents.

“I view them as displaced because as a result of the poverty, inadequate livelihood and inability to afford a stable place of shelter,” attorney Rajkumar stated.

The act or inaction of the State in allowing its citizens to be subjected to the elements of nature such that it placed life and limb at risk, amounts to cruel and harsh punishment by the State.

And this amounts, therefore, to a breach of their rights as enshrined in the constitution (Section 4 c) which is the right of a citizen to be treated with respect, and that of his family life, the attorney claimed. The lawsuit comes up for hearing tomorrow before Justice Margaret Mohammed in the San Fernando High Court.