Every­one who has re­ceived a plot of land from the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) will have a house built on it. The THA-owned Cour­land Es­tate will be the first site for the promised ser­vice plot hous­ing de­vel­op­ment, THA Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don dis­closed at the post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil me­dia brief­ing on Wednes­day. Lon­don told re­porters the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil ap­proved the process for pro­vid­ing plots to meet the hous­ing need of de­serv­ing peo­ple in To­ba­go. The As­sem­bly is tak­ing care to en­sure that hous­es would be built on all plots dis­trib­uted, since "giv­ing land to peo­ple does not al­ways trans­late to hous­es", Lon­don point­ed out.

The THA has had to re­as­sign plots that were giv­en to peo­ple more than 30 to 40 years ago, but are still va­cant to this day. The di­vi­sion of In­fra­struc­ture and Pub­lic Util­i­ties and the Di­vi­sion Set­tle­ments and Labour were ex­pect­ed to play a ma­jor role in this project. Lon­don said the di­vi­sions would be re­spon­si­ble for all in­fra­struc­ture works in­clud­ing roads, elec­tric­i­ty, wa­ter, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, waste treat­ment and drainage.

Al­ready the Di­vi­sion of Set­tle­ments and Labour has made a re­quest to the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion for af­ford­able hous­ing de­signs."We will try to de­vel­op small­er ser­vice plots-in oth­er words, in­stead of the five or 10,000 square feet we might look at three or 4,000 and de­sign hous­es so that at the end of the day they can be af­ford­able," Lon­don said. Fur­ther to this, the di­vi­sion, along with the Land Man­age­ment Unit, will al­so en­sure that all the Town and Coun­try and En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) ap­provals are ob­tained. The THA will take the process a step fur­ther by mak­ing a for­mal arrange­ment with the Trinidad and To­ba­go Mort­gage Fi­nance Com­pa­ny or any oth­er ap­proved fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion so that qual­i­fy­ing in­di­vid­u­als could ac­cess fund­ing to con­struct their homes.

Lon­don said the newest ad­di­tion to the THA's hous­ing pack­age op­por­tu­ni­ties was meant to help meet the chal­lenge of pro­vid­ing hous­ing for about 6,000 ap­pli­cants. He ex­plained that the As­sem­bly could not build hous­es for all the de­serv­ing peo­ple in To­ba­go and the ini­tia­tive would there­fore re­duce some of the ac­tu­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for con­struct­ing homes.