SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

In a first for the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC), 500 hous­es were al­lo­cat­ed in a live draw yes­ter­day. The HDC has pre­vi­ous­ly done ran­dom lot­ter­ies for home al­lo­ca­tions but those were not pub­lic draws.

Ad­dress­ing a vir­tu­al au­di­ence on the HDC’s so­cial me­dia plat­forms, Hous­ing Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon said the min­istry and HDC are try­ing to ad­dress a back­log of 180,000 ap­pli­cants.

Dil­lon said since 2015, the HDC has al­lo­cat­ed 3,000 units to el­i­gi­ble ap­pli­cants. That 3,000 in­clud­ed the al­lo­ca­tion of 525 homes to mem­bers of the pro­tec­tive ser­vices and the De­fence Force. 

“We con­tin­ue to ful­fil what I con­sid­er one of the ba­sic needs of men or women, we will con­tin­ue to do so be­cause the gov­ern­ment do be­lieve that we have a du­ty to pro­vide hous­ing, to pro­vide shel­ters to our cit­i­zens es­pe­cial­ly those in the low and mid­dle-in­come brack­et,” he said.

“We are hap­py to do when one con­sid­ers the amount of peo­ple on our data­base, we have to come up with cre­ative so­lu­tions.”

Dil­lon said giv­en calls for so­cial dis­tanc­ing due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, the HDC de­cid­ed to do the draw live for trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty. 

He said those se­lect­ed in yes­ter­day’s draw were ap­pli­cants who ap­plied for homes in the Ari­ma, Ch­agua­nas and San Fer­nan­do ar­eas.

Oth­er cri­te­ria for the draw were cit­i­zen­ship and a house­hold in­come be­tween $4,000 and $25,000.

Dil­lon said in the com­ing months, 600 more ap­pli­cants will be se­lect­ed for hous­ing in an­oth­er ran­dom draw.

“We have every in­ten­tion of con­tin­u­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion, we have the in­ten­tion of do­ing so through ran­dom draws and through oth­er cri­te­ria, pro­vid­ing for the de­fence and pro­tec­tive ser­vices, for those are chal­lenged and all oth­er as man­dat­ed by gov­ern­ment’s pol­i­cy.”

He said the Gov­ern­ment re­mains com­mit­ted to ex­plor­ing vi­able hous­ing ini­tia­tives to aug­ment the State hous­ing stock so more fam­i­lies can get homes.

“Giv­en avail­able re­sources, we at the Min­istry and the HDC will do all we can to meet some of the pent up de­mand for hous­ing. To­day is a hap­py mo­ment be­cause we are broad­en­ing the scope, widen­ing the catch­ment area, to en­sure a larg­er amount of our cit­i­zens can ben­e­fit from our hous­ing pro­gramme.”