Shas­tri Boodan

Low-in­come and min­i­mum-wage earn­ers will be giv­en pri­or­i­ty ac­cess to apart­ments at the long-de­layed Ed­in­burgh 500 Tow­ers in Ch­agua­nas, ac­cord­ing to Hous­ing Min­is­ter Adri­an Leonce.

Dur­ing a site vis­it on Wednes­day, Leonce an­nounced that each of the two tow­ers com­pris­es 70 apart­ments, with ground-floor units re­served for per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties. The de­vel­op­ment of­fers a rent-to-own mod­el, with month­ly pay­ments rang­ing from $1,000 to $1,800 for two- and three-bed­room units.

Leonce em­pha­sized that suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cants must join a legal­ly con­sti­tut­ed home­own­ers’ as­so­ci­a­tion, which will col­lect a month­ly main­te­nance fee and en­sure com­pli­ance with lease terms. He warned that ten­ants who at­tempt to sub­let their apart­ments in vi­o­la­tion of their con­tracts could face le­gal ac­tion by the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC).

He stat­ed that the west­ern tow­er will be com­plet­ed by the end of the year. Con­struc­tion orig­i­nal­ly be­gan in 2006 but was halt­ed in 2011. The project re­sumed in 2021, with the HDC im­ple­ment­ing up­dat­ed build­ing codes and re­designs to bring the de­vel­op­ment up to stan­dard.

Leonce added that the HDC will al­so be work­ing to make hous­ing more af­ford­able for low-in­come earn­ers in up­com­ing de­vel­op­ments, with units priced be­tween $300,000 and $500,000.

Leonce al­so said the HDC is mov­ing to clean up its data­base of 120,000 ap­pli­cants.

Aabi­da Al­la­ham, Mar­ket­ing Man­ag­er for Stan­dard Dis­trib­u­tors (a mem­ber of the ANSA McAL Group), said her or­ga­ni­za­tion is work­ing with the HDC to pro­vide af­ford­able ap­pli­ances for suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cants. She said some pack­ages start as low as $6,000 and in­clude a wash­er, stove, re­frig­er­a­tor, and mi­crowave.

How­ev­er, the an­nounce­ment was met with crit­i­cism from Op­po­si­tion MP David Lee, the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) can­di­date for Ca­roni Cen­tral, where the tow­ers are lo­cat­ed. In a phone in­ter­view, Lee dis­missed the move as a pre-elec­tion pub­lic re­la­tions stunt.

“There have been long­stand­ing struc­tur­al is­sues with these tow­ers,” Lee claimed. “I un­der­stand the el­e­va­tor isn’t even work­ing. This feels just like the grand open­ings we’ve seen at the Port of Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal and the air­port in To­ba­go — more for show than sub­stance.”

Lee al­so raised safe­ty con­cerns about al­low­ing res­i­dents to move in­to a site that is still un­der con­struc­tion. “There’s dust, noise, and un­safe sur­round­ings. Who moves peo­ple in­to a par­tial­ly com­plet­ed project? I hope this is not an­oth­er fool-the-peo­ple cam­paign by Young and his in­ex­pe­ri­enced min­is­ters,” he said.

The Ed­in­burgh 500 Tow­ers are part of the gov­ern­ment’s on­go­ing ef­forts to pro­vide af­ford­able hous­ing across Trinidad and To­ba­go.