CH&PA aims to provide 5,000 housing solutions within three years

Jul 24, 2017 News

The Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) is hoping that it can provide housing for 5,000 households over the next three years.
This will include house lots and housing units.
This was disclosed by Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Lelon Saul during a recent press conference. He said that the CH&PA is currently working on a plan to address the demand for housing and that there will be several solutions.
“We know that some people are desirous of getting a service lot but I can assure you not only service lots we will be providing. Of course, we will provide built units also, and we hope in the near future to provide approximately 5,000 solutions over the next 36 months (three years) or so at a minimum.”
In November of last year, it was explained by former Chairman of the CH&PA, Hamilton Green, that it would take about $60B to complete and regularise 380 housing and squatting areas across Guyana.
At that time, the CH&PA had on file, 25,000 applications for house lots and turn-key homes. Of that number, 17,851 were classified as low income households. Green had it would cost around $50 billion for CH&PA to create communities instead of issuing house lots by constructing 10,000 housing units/apartments and duplexes inclusive of infrastructural works. He also said that government may have to add $60B to complete infrastructure in existing schemes.
Asked to provide an update on the squatter regularisation exercise, Saul said the issue is currently being addressed and that data is still being collected.
He said that a plot of land in Industry Village, East Coast Demerara has been identified as a place where squatters can be relocated. Saul explained that in the new year, the CH&PA will begin to specifically deal with the movement of squatters to that location.
He also said that the Authority is examining the likelihood in some cases of building core homes or core houses for squatters. Based on data provided on the CH&PA website, there are over 216 squatting areas across Guyana and 154 of these have been brought under the Authority’s regularisation programme.
The other locations cannot be regularised since they are on road reserves, sea-defence reserves and drainage reserves which have been classified as zero tolerance areas by the CH&PA.
Additionally, as it relates to the monitoring of infrastructure that is constructed and installed within communities controlled by CH&PA, Saul said that the Authority will be recruiting rangers to ensure that there is no abuse of the infrastructure or vandalism of infrastructure in CH&PA communities.
Saul said that the CH&PA is very concerned about vandalism of infrastructure. He mentioned that along the East Bank of Demerara, the water network that was installed by the CH&PA was vandalised and would have to be rehabilitated to the tune of about $40M.

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