Build houses, not stadia

Every day men and women are starting their families, but a glance at newspaper advertisements shows rents and house-prices beyond their reach.

Minister of Housing, Dr Keith Rowley, last week at a ceremony to hand out new public housing in Tunapuna, made all the right noises, but left questions unanswered.

Rowley said his ministry’s Housing Development Corporation (HDC) is constrained in building new apartments by the unavailability of affordable land especially in the East West Corridor (for which he made a plea) and a lack of contractors willing to build public housing when they earn higher profits elsewhere. Rowley gave a partial but incomplete progress report on the HDC’s housing scheme to build 100,000 units in ten years, which works out to 10,000 per year.

A rough calculation shows that after four years and seven months in office since 2001, the Government should have by now built 46,000 completed housing units. However the Government seems to have fallen short. Dr Rowley last week said that since 2001 the Government has initiated a total of 23,000 units, or just half of the projected number.

Further, Dr Rowley did not say how many of these 23,000 units had actually been completed, an omission which made his figures virtually meaningless.

We don’t wish to blame Dr Rowley personally for the housing shortcomings, especially as at last week’s function he shared insights into the problems of providing housing. In fact, this Government has had three ministers of housing in succession - Danny Montano, Martin Joseph and Keith Rowley – a turnover which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that the Government has a high priority for housing. The Government as a whole cannot yet be said to have met its housing promises which had been a central plank of its manifesto in the three general elections of 2000, 2001 and 2002.

While Dr Rowley didn’t say so, some observers have said the housing crisis has likely been exacerbated by the Government’s current mega-projects, particularly the construction of a high-rise Port-of-Spain waterfront. We tend to agree. It is widely known that in addition to the scarcity of contractors mentioned by Rowley, who apparently feel there is money to be made in the more lucrative private sector materials and workers are also hard to come by.

If the Government’s other proposed mega-projects like the Tarouba Sports Complex, the Carnival complex, the Social Development Towers plus the aluminium smelters also come on stream, this is surely also likely to further worsen a crisis situation. In addition, how does the planned redevelopment of East Port-of-Spain fit into the Government’s housing plans? We say public housing must be the Government’s priority.

Of course any new public housing must not create new problems such as the destruction of hillsides to cause flooding, concreting of valuable agricultural lands, or the overcrowding of existing communities.

We urge the Government at its highest levels to reaffirm its commitment to providing affordable public housing, without harming agriculture and the environment even if it has to put its proposed mega-projects on the back-burner. We would also like to see a progress report stating the exact number of public housing units so far completed. Meanwhile people are desperate and we say build more houses.