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Tuesday, February 25, 2025

350 bid for 160 Mt Hope HDC homes

by

Shaliza Hassanali
2358 days ago
20180912

While 176,000 ap­pli­cants are wait­ing in line for Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) homes, on­ly 160 suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cants will be­come own­ers of the HDC’s mil­lion-dol­lar apart­ments at Ma­hogany Court in Mt Hope.

The 48 two-bed­room apart­ments are ex­pect­ed to cost each home­own­er $1.1 mil­lion, while its 112 three-bed­room apart­ments will fetch high­er prices. Eight of the three-bed­room, two bath­room apart­ments, will be built for the phys­i­cal­ly chal­lenged.

This was re­vealed yes­ter­day fol­low­ing a tour of the project’s con­struc­tion site by con­trac­tor and ex­ec­u­tive chair­man of NH Emile Elias, Hous­ing Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon, HDC chair­man New­man George and its CEO Brent Lyons.

The vis­it was to give an up­date on the project.

The sod for the project was turned in No­vem­ber 2016 with work be­ing start­ed in April of this year. Com­ple­tion is ex­pect­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2021.

Elias boast­ed that NH’s ten­der was $100 mil­lion low­er than the sec­ond ten­der­er. The val­ue of the con­tract was $192 mil­lion. The de­vel­op­ment is ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed in four phas­es with a to­tal yield of 160 two and three-bed­room, two bath­room apart­ment units.

Elias said First Cit­i­zens has fi­nanced this first pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship mod­el for the hous­ing sec­tor in­stead of the HDC.

At a press con­fer­ence fol­low­ing the tour, Elias ad­mit­ted there were de­lays with the project based on fi­nanc­ing and get­ting the banks on board.

“The con­struc­tion is the easy part for us. But the fi­nanc­ing is a chal­lenge….get­ting the loan agree­ments done…get­ting all the I’s dot­ted and T’s crossed. But now it serves as a mod­el,” Elias said.

Asked about the cost of the apart­ments, George said, “The av­er­age cost of one of these units would be about $1.1 mil­lion.”

George ad­mit­ted the cost of the three-bed­room apart­ments would be “a lit­tle high­er.” Pressed fur­ther on this cost, George said the HDC would have to work that out.

Asked if the HDC had moved away from its man­date of build­ing af­ford­able homes for low-in­come earn­ers, George said this was not so.

“HDC is still do­ing that in oth­er de­vel­op­ments.”

George cit­ed Riv­er Runs Through in Ari­ma, priced at $585,000 and oth­er projects at Mal­abar, Carlsen­field, Bon Air South and Lake View that were rea­son­ably priced to meet the needs of those seek­ing homes.

George said ap­prox­i­mate­ly 23,700 of the HDC’s ap­pli­cants had in­di­cat­ed they would like to live in the San Juan/Laven­tille and Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co re­gions. These ap­pli­cants fell with­in the $14,000 to $25,000 month­ly pay range.

A back­ground sheet pro­vid­ed by the HDC said of the 23,700 ap­pli­cants, on­ly 350 had been short­list­ed and pre-qual­i­fied for the Ma­hogany Court de­vel­op­ment. How­ev­er, of those short­list­ed on­ly 160 will qual­i­fy for an apart­ment.

In the fact sheet, it showed that 31,857 of HDC’s ap­pli­cants had ex­pressed an in­ter­est to live in the Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co re­gion, while 19,855 pre­ferred to live San Fer­nan­do, with Ch­agua­nas and Ari­ma hav­ing the least fig­ures with 17,804 and 15,517 re­spec­tive­ly.

Since tak­ing up of­fice as min­is­ter last month, Dil­lon said there were 176,000 ap­pli­cants wait­ing in line for hous­ing. He ad­mit­ted there had been an in­crease in ap­pli­cants.

“It will con­tin­ue to in­crease be­cause there are al­ways young peo­ple look­ing for homes and hous­es,” Dil­lon said.

Last Au­gust, for­mer hous­ing min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell said the HDC had 170,000 ap­pli­ca­tions in its sys­tem.


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