Min­is­ter of Hous­ing and Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment David Lee says he is al­ready “swamped with re­quests” for hous­ing.

He said this on­ly shows that the de­mand for hous­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go cur­rent­ly far ex­ceeds sup­ply.

Speak­ing af­ter ar­riv­ing at the min­istry’s head of­fice at South Quay, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, where he met with Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Hous­ing Anil Roberts and oth­er se­nior of­fi­cials, Lee said he was ready to get down to busi­ness.

“Well, it feels good. As you know, the Min­istry of Hous­ing and Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment is a de­liv­ery min­istry,” Lee said. “So, my­self and min­is­ter Roberts, we’re here this morn­ing, and it’s our first day on the job. We’re still meet­ing with the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary and the team to get a han­dle on what has been hap­pen­ing in hous­ing de­vel­op­ment, HDC es­pe­cial­ly, and we’ll take it from there af­ter we get a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of what has been tran­spir­ing.”

Lee, who is al­so the Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Ca­roni Cen­tral, said the new min­is­te­r­i­al team will first as­sess the cur­rent state of the min­istry’s op­er­a­tions be­fore rolling out any new plans.

Not­ing the high de­mand for hous­ing, he said, “From the time I was ap­point­ed, I’ve been swamped with re­quests. Present­ly, with­out get­ting too much in­volved or say­ing much, I think the de­mand out­strips the sup­ply. So, we would have to re­al­ly work with the hous­ing team to see how best we can de­liv­er on the promis­es that we would have said about hous­ing in our man­i­festo.”

When asked about his plans for new hous­ing de­vel­op­ments or spe­cif­ic projects, Lee was cau­tious.

“Well, I don’t want to pre-empt any­thing at this point in time. We’re still go­ing through what the min­istry has in place. And we’ll be look­ing at what took place, and then we’ll take it for­ward from there. But it will be too ear­ly to give any idea of what our plans are at this point in time,” he said.

Lee ac­knowl­edged con­cerns re­cent­ly raised by HDC em­ploy­ees re­gard­ing con­tract ter­mi­na­tions. He as­sured the is­sue would be ad­dressed in due course.

“I’ll have a dis­cus­sion with the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary on that. I re­al­ly don’t know about that is­sue. As you know, we weren’t in gov­ern­ment last week. We’re now in gov­ern­ment this week. So, we’ll take it step by step. But I’m sure we’ll get to the bot­tom of it and every­one will be treat­ed fair­ly,” he said.

The new min­is­ters are ex­pect­ed to pro­vide fur­ther up­dates in the com­ing weeks fol­low­ing in­ter­nal as­sess­ments and con­tin­ued stake­hold­er con­sul­ta­tions.