In May 2012, two HDC apartment buildings at Las Alturas in Morvant were declared a loss and set to be demolished after efforts to salvage the $26 million buildings failed. Land slippage had begun to break the buildings apart, and the demolition would add $3.3 million to the cost of the failed structures.
On Friday, Housing Minister Dr Roodal Moonilal announced that the Housing Development Corporation will begin to fast-track mortgages through its financing agency, T&T Mortgage Finance.
With good planning, that initiative will remove some of the bottlenecks in distributing housing to qualified home owners, but it isn't the only step that the HDC could be making to improve access to its existing housing stock for the considerable number of prospective home owners who have been keen to buy a property from the corporation.
It's one of the more embarrassing aspects of the HDC's management of its projects that several of these major housing initiatives have suffered setbacks during construction. That has led to hundreds of housing units falling into disrepair and becoming vulnerable to theft and environmental deterioration.Lions Gate Development at Egypt Street in Enterprise, Chaguanas, was in a state of dilapidation in 2011. The $156 million project, started in 2007, stalled after the contractor claimed that payments were stopped by the HDC.