Dear Editor,
As a former Director of the Central Housing and Planning Authority Board I have noted the vigour with which the Minister of Communities has been moving to build apartment buildings in housing schemes. I strongly feel this is a big mistake and a waste of scarce resources. Apartment buildings were built in 1989 by the H D Hoyte government and after a while they failed; the cost of maintenance of those apartments by the occupier was huge and was milking them of their resources.
“The unit proprietor in the property shall permit the board of management and its agent, at all reasonable times on notice except in the case of emergency when no notice shall be required to enter his unit for the purpose of inspecting and maintaining, repairing, or renewing, pipes, wires, cables and ducts for the time being existing in the unit and capable of being used in connection with enjoyment of the unit or the common property.” There were a lot of constraints on the part of the occupier of the unit; he had to forthwith carry out all work ordered by any competent public authority in respect of his unit. Many of the occupiers couldn’t enjoy the common property in the manner for which it was designed; often there were complaints of noise nuisance and hazard to the occupier by an occupier of another apartment.
My take on this whole issue is that Guyana has 83,000 square miles with a population of about 700,000 people, and still the present and previous governments have been finding it hard to find land for the 10,000 outstanding applicants. With 83,000 square miles of land, every Guyanese should be able to own a big plot of land to build their house and have land space to do some subsistence gardening which will help augment their small income, but it seems to me we do not have good planners in the government systems to guide our ministers. When the government builds apartments the occupiers will have no space to plant a kitchen garden or even a flower garden, so what kind of planning is this? This plan will have little or no impact on the applicants’ needs.
An evaluation of the nature and forms of housing in Guyana for over three decades to 2016 would lead to the conclusion that there had been no recognizable policy and programme in place. There was a better policy in 1972 under the National Development Plan, where the house lots were bigger with all the necessary infrastructure in place before the applicant occupied their land in the schemes. The Central Board of Health inspectors had to inspect the new schemes and make sure that all the infrastructure was in place before the first and second certificates were issued to the Ministry of Housing.
In October 1992, when the PPP/C took over the reins of government it removed these requirements. The applicants were given plots of land without the infrastructure in place, in order to facilitate the fast-tracking of certificates of title so the owners could secure mortgages from the banks to build. The size of the house lot was reduced and the price skyrocketed 10 fold. The applicants had no choice because they were badly in need of a piece of land to build a house; many of them were living in rented houses working for a small salary. When this new government first took office on May 11, 2015, they too followed suit issuing small house lots at the same price without the basic infrastructure in place. It’s good to know that the Minister of Communities is moving to put these things in place so applicants won’t have to spend three times the money they paid for the land to develop it.
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Khan
