Dear Editor,
In recent times there has been a spate of articles on housing in Guyana from some rather important and influential persons such as Mr Peter Ramsaroop, Dr Prem Misir, the Mayor of Georgetown and one of the Peeping Toms. However it was Mr Peter Ramsaroop whose article (Stabroek Business, 6.4.08) was most useful to those of us who are interested in finding ways in which we (as a nation) could do things differently in an effort to house all our people.
We need to recognize that all the governments so far have done some very useful things in response to the challenge of creating adequate housing for poor Guyanese. However, these responses have fallen short, so today we don’t seem to be winning the fight to house our people. With the recent rise in prices of so many commodities poor people’s ability to build their homes will be further reduced.
It seems to me that if we marry the approaches of both the government of the 1970s and the present government we will have an approach that offers us our best chances in these times for housing our people. In the 1970s there was a mixed approach to solving the problem: the government encouraged citizens to form self-help groups which were provided with land and construction materials. A foreman was attached to each group to guide the work they did. At the same time, private investors were encouraged to invest in the housing industry, for those who could afford to purchase. Thus both the poor and the not so poor were catered for. The present government seems to favour making land available for people to build their own homes, while also encouraging private investors to invest in the housing sector. Mr Ramsaroop’s article correctly observed that the awarding of underdeveloped house lots to poor people was hardly helpful. He went on to note, “many of these families cannot afford to engage in construction and they are not eligible for loans.” The Ministry of Housing must by now understand this, since it is regularly publicly threatening to repossess lands that it sold citizens who have not been able to build after what the ministry considered a long time of ownership.
The problem with the government’s efforts in the 1970s was that house-building involving persons untrained in carpentry and masonry carried up the eventual cost of the houses through wastage of materials. Secondly the fact that the working poor had to build after doing a normal day’s work at their regular place of employment meant that the pace of construction was very slow.
So I would go for a three-pronged approach to housing our people. This would be (a) homes produced by private investors, (b) the allocation of land to the not so poor who have the capacity to raise the funds needed to build and (c) a self-help programme for the very poor. As we do this we also need to heed Mr Ramsaroop’s advice that “we upgrade the laws as they pertain to mortgages and real estate development to offer the required level of protection to mortgagers and the general public.”
Next we need to find ways of making local materials like wood; cheap for our people. At the same time, we have to begin to urgently search for alternative local materials for building our homes. Venezuela has done this with some success and has been able to dramatically bring down the cost of a home to the poor. Of course we made attempts to go in that direction, with the creation of clay blocks. But while we ended up creating a beautiful block, it turned out to be more expensive than the concrete block. Perhaps we need to return to examining the possibility of creating this block at a cheaper price. With the growth in technology this might be possible. Also, with the prices of sand and cement being what they are today, the clay brick might now be cheaper to produce. Whether we like it or not, we will have to begin to think outside of the box if we are serious about housing all of our people. To think automatically of cement and wood when we contemplate building our homes might soon be a thing of the past.
Yours faithfully,
Claudius Prince
