The chairperson of the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CHPA), Mr. Hamilton Green, was recently reported as stating that between 1994 and 2015, 66,124 house lots were allocated by the PPP/C government; to date 28,220 of those lots are still unoccupied and there is a waiting list of 25,000 applicants. I am quite certain that if he drills down on these numbers he is likely to find that this level of occupancy is quite reasonable when one considers that they are related to poor people who have to acquire the land before they can begin to approach families and banks for funding.
According to Mr. Green, ‘the Administration has conceptualized a new model to improve housing delivery system and address the backlog of 25,000 applicants and particularly the 17,851 who can be classified as low income households.’ He claimed that the housing programme inherited from the PPP/C was ‘overly ambitious’ because it sought to provide serviced house lots to those desirous of acquiring them and turnkey housing units to those who could afford them (5,000 duplexes/apartments with infrastructure to cost $50b –CH&PA. SN 01/11/2016).
Some time before this statement, the junior minister responsible for housing,
