KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Imag­ine spend­ing al­most half the cost of your home on re­pairs and still fear­ing it may col­lapse. This is the re­al­i­ty for one Moru­ga fam­i­ly, a prob­lem re­port­ed­ly oc­cur­ring across Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) com­mu­ni­ties.

Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Hous­ing Phillip Ed­ward Alexan­der said these is­sues will be pre­sent­ed to Par­lia­ment soon.

Dur­ing a tour of the HDC’s Gomez Trace De­vel­op­ment on Mon­day, Alexan­der not­ed that the prob­lems raised by Moru­ga/Table­land MP Michelle Ben­jamin point­ed to sys­temic is­sues.

Alexan­der said the HDC’s en­gi­neer­ing team must con­duct a full as­sess­ment in the com­mu­ni­ty, as some hous­es may need to be de­mol­ished. He said Hous­ing Min­is­ter Dr David Lee will meet with the HDC board and tech­nocrats to de­cide the next steps.

“I have stood in hous­es that peo­ple should not be liv­ing in. It is dan­ger­ous. An earth­quake could put it down. They had to retro­fit the columns. The col­umn is sup­posed to be the struc­tur­al in­tegri­ty of the build­ing. In this case, where the columns had to be re­placed, the build­ing can no longer re­ly on that in­tegri­ty. They are stand­ing on stilts, and that is dan­ger­ous,” Alexan­der said.

He said he and his team toured sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ties and found re­cur­ring is­sues with con­struc­tion man­age­ment. He said re­ports are be­ing com­piled to in­form Par­lia­ment and the pub­lic on how the min­istry and HDC will re­spond.

“It is on­ly a mat­ter of time be­fore that com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­ment is avail­able to the Prime Min­is­ter and to the Par­lia­ment. Se­ri­ous de­ci­sions have to be made. The Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion has some ques­tions to an­swer.”

One Gomez Trace res­i­dent said his yard is wa­ter­logged and his walls are crack­ing. He has aban­doned one bed­room and con­vert­ed it in­to stor­age, but fears for his wife and two young chil­dren if the home col­laps­es.

He said the HDC car­ried out re­pairs sev­er­al times but nev­er ad­dressed the drainage is­sue, leav­ing the foun­da­tion to shift and the perime­ter to crack.

“The first time they (HDC) came, they sent a sub­con­trac­tor. Down to the con­trac­tor would have told me, ‘This house will fall at some time now. The works we are do­ing right now are not suf­fi­cient to fix this house.’ This prob­lem is the foun­da­tion,” the res­i­dent said.

The res­i­dent said the HDC must de­cide whether to re­lo­cate his fam­i­ly or is­sue a re­fund, as it is un­fair to keep pay­ing a mort­gage while his home is falling apart.

Ben­jamin said that con­struc­tion of the Gomez Trace com­mu­ni­ty be­gan un­der the Patrick Man­ning-led gov­ern­ment but took years to com­plete. Homes were al­lo­cat­ed be­tween 2015 and 2016. She said the com­mu­ni­ty was prone to land move­ment, which con­tin­ues to dam­age hous­es.