The President’s plan for Georgetown and the cost of rent

Dec 06, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – I was scrolling through TikTok the other night, which is something I only do when I’m trying to feel young, relevant, or mildly depressed. There, between a cat doing the Macarena and a man explaining why you should never trust people who eat pizza with a fork, a young woman from Sophia appeared on my screen.

She spoke with the exhausted cheerfulness common to people who have accepted their fate, like airline passengers listening to a pilot casually mention “a slight issue with the hydraulics.” She explained that she simply could not afford to move anywhere else in Georgetown because rentals elsewhere were priced at levels last seen during the era of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

And apparently, many landlords have now decided that the Guyanese dollar is too passé. They want rent in US dollars, which is great, because nothing says patriotic nation-building quite like pricing your own citizens out of their own city in the currency of another.

Now, I’m no economist. If I were, I would’ve retired long ago and be living in some minimalist Scandinavian apartment where even the soap looks expensive. But even I can see that housing costs in Georgetown have reached a level where only hedge-fund managers, oil executives, and people who “accidentally” win the Lotto can afford to live.

The average family that doesn’t own property spends so much of its income on rent that it must choose between buying groceries or paying electricity. You know things are bad when the light bill becomes a luxury purchase, like a yacht or almond milk.

Part of the problem is the shrinking housing stock in Georgetown. Successive governments have taken such a wildly cavalier approach to zoning that one suspects the national zoning policy was written by someone who genuinely believed cities thrive on chaos.

Residential neighbourhoods have been transformed into commercial districts at the speed of a toddler destroying a birthday cake. These days you can buy a house, fill out a form, and—poof!—it becomes a business property. It’s like legal alchemy, except we’re turning properties, formerly used for housing, into office buildings, convenience stores, commercial stores and even brothels.

And the business class is the main culprit. They are buying up properties the way children buy snow cones: impulsively, enthusiastically, and in bulk. Not just in Georgetown but beyond. Everywhere, homes are being swallowed up and spat out as businesses.  This means fewer houses for actual human beings to live in, which pushes rent skyward until it reaches the altitude where only aircraft and people with “international investors” on speed dial can breathe.

Ideally, people should be able to rent reasonably priced accommodation near where they work. It’s a simple concept, one shared by most cities that don’t actively despise their residents. But Georgetown has an acute shortage of housing. You can work in the city, but unless you are wealthy or have the negotiating skills of a United Nations diplomat, you must commute from distances so far that you begin to experience spiritual detachment.

Which brings me to the grand plan to improve Georgetown. Reports say the President requested a study on the housing stock, which is promising, provided the plan is not to accelerate the current trend of converting every remaining home into a business. One hopes, desperately, that the intention is to stop the city from morphing entirely into a commercial maze. A city without homes is like a body without a heart: technically functional, but only because machines are doing all the work.

But yesterday’s rains reminded us that housing is only one of our municipal nightmares. The downpour made an absolute mockery of the proposal to concrete the city’s drains.

After moderate showers, the water rose so fast that I briefly wondered if Noah was hiring carpenters. What Georgetown needs is not concrete drains but the radical idea of cleaning them, clearing the canals, and allowing water to flow somewhere other than our living rooms. Basic drainage is not a luxury; it’s the bare minimum expected of a city that wishes to remain above sea level.

But is drainage a part of the really thorny question, that one that keeps young people awake at night is how they are supposed to afford rent in a city where rents behave like they are training for the Olympics. Families are suffocating under the pressure. Young adults live with parents not out of cultural tradition, but sheer financial necessity.

And those who try to leave end up right back on TikTok, explaining to strangers why they’re still in Sophia while landlords cheerfully demand US$1,200 for an apartment where the bathroom door doesn’t close properly.

This brings me back to the President’s plan. By all means, let’s fix Georgetown. Let’s improve it, modernize it, uplift it. But maybe—just maybe—we start by ensuring that people can actually afford to live in it.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)      

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• cost of rent, Georgetown, Peeping Tom, Sophia

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