Govt revolutionising housing in TT

PRIME MINISTER Patrick Manning announced that Government is revolutionising housing in Trinidad and Tobago by providing new homeowners with certain basic items as part of their mortgage arrangements.

Addressing a sod-turning ceremony for the Green Street Housing Development in Tunapuna on Tuesday, the Prime Minister said Green Street and its sister housing project, El Dorado Gardens, as “merely a small aspect of the most revolutionary and expansive National Housing Policy ever to be undertaken in this country”. “On this project, we will initiate our housing policy which says we will provide as part of our houses certain chattel items. Fridge, stove, washing machine dryer all as part of one mortgage arrangement,” Manning declared.

He stated that as Government undertakes “the systematic and organised physical transformation of Trinidad and Tobago wherever this is required”, it was not a question of just providing housing “but decent and affordable homes that would provide a testament to our human dignity”. “What the home is to the individual and the family, is at a certain level a microcosmic reflection of what our national buildings, cities and municipality structures would mean to the national community and to Trinidad and Tobago,” the Prime Minister said. Manning indicated that the study rooms in the new units would “find its compliment and extension within the walls of the NALIS building in Port-of-Spain”.

He noted that until recently there was a considerable neglect of housing and for 15 years, the demand was allowed to outstrip the supply. “Since the Government reassumed office we committed ourselves to a position that the housing situation in this country must never again be allowed to deteriorate to that point where so many of our citizens are without decent living accommodations and where so many tenants remain the subject to the dictates of unscrupulous and difficult landlords, and where squatting becomes the ultimate and singular ambition in the life of so many where unplanned and unregulated housing distort national planning and other agencies of development and progress,” Manning declared.

The Prime Minister also disclosed that the Inter-American Development Bank has given “the green light for subsidies and loan grants in respect of key aspects of the Government’s housing policy, with a view to alleviating the burden of the poor and those below a certain income threshold in Trinidad and Tobago”.