Yvonne Ba­boolal

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.