The ladder with the missing rungs

Jan 21, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – They tell the story in the numbers first. Mortgage rates for low-income earners have been trimmed. The brag is that the cost of building homes for low-income persons has been reduced.

On paper it looks like progress. For the poor man staring at a bare house lot under the hot sun, the lower interest rate is almost meaningless. The real barrier is not the cost of borrowing. It is the cost of building.

Spend a day in any new housing scheme and the truth is impossible to miss. The structures going up are not shacks slowly improved with sweat equity. They are concrete fortresses with tiled roofs, security fences, and two-storied ambitions.

These are not the homes of the poorest of the poor. They belong to the middle class and the comfortably rich, people who can absorb shocks in material prices and who can pay labourers whatever the market now demands. The government can distribute house lots by the thousands, but land without affordable construction is little more than a cruel promise.

Officials will point, defensively, to tax concessions on construction materials. Yes, some duties have been eased. But the market has absorbed those concessions without passing on meaningful relief. Prices remain stubbornly high, driven by currency pressures, and a construction boom fuelled by public and private megaprojects. The poor man does not buy cement by the container. He buys by the bag, at retail prices that bear little resemblance to the policy speeches delivered by Ministers – I also said in parliament. Then I realised parliament is not meeting to debate these issues.

Then there is labour, the quiet crisis few in authority seem willing to confront. Construction wages have exploded. A man pushing a wheelbarrow now earns twice as much as an entry-level public servant. Skilled tradesmen command sums that would have seemed fanciful a decade ago.

In isolation, higher wages sound like progress. But economics is never that simple. These costs are passed on relentlessly—to the cost of a house, to the price of goods on supermarket shelves, to the services that every household depends on. High labour costs are helping to drive inflation, and inflation, as always, punishes the poor most severely.

For the aspiring homeowner at the bottom of the ladder, labour costs are the final, crushing blow. Even if he secures a government house lot—and that is no small feat—he quickly discovers that he cannot afford to hire the workers needed to lay a foundation, raise walls, or cover a roof. Self-help is a fantasy.

Not many are willing to help without at least a day’s pay – and a day’s pay is a princely sum these days. The result is paralysis: empty lots, dashed hopes, and a growing sense that the system is designed for someone else.

It is here, in this gap between promise and reality, that politics intrudes. The impressive showing of the WIN party in the 2025 general and regional elections did not emerge from thin air. It was fed by resentment, by the visible marginalisation of poor people who were told they were part of a housing revolution and then watched others reap the benefits. Housing policy, in practice, has become a subsidy for those who already have resources. The poor are left with land they cannot use, mortgages they cannot service, and dreams they cannot afford.

Banks, for their part, continue to advertise lower mortgage rates as if credit alone builds houses. A mortgage does not pour concrete. It does not pay masons or carpenters. For the poor borrower, the bank’s generosity stops at the loan approval. The real costs—the spiralling estimates from contractors, the unexpected increases in labour fees—remain his problem alone. Many walk away before the first block is laid.

Budget 2026 looms as another test of seriousness. One of the questions it must answer, plainly and without evasion, is how the government intends to drive down the cost of labour in the country—or at least prevent it from continuing to spiral unchecked. This is not a call to suppress wages, but to confront structural distortions: the imbalance between public sector pay and private sector demand, the lack of trained workers, the absence of productivity-linked wage frameworks. Without intervention, labour costs will continue to ripple through the economy, inflating prices and deepening inequality.

Home ownership has long been sold as a ladder out of poverty, a stake in stability and dignity. Today, that ladder is missing rungs.

The poor man can see the house lots. He can hear about low mortgage rates. What he cannot do is afford the materials or the labour to turn land into shelter. Until policy addresses that brutal arithmetic, housing will remain less a social programme than a showcase—impressive to look at, and largely out of reach for those who need it most.

(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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• borrowing, cost of building, low-income earners, Mortgage rates, Peeping Tom

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