SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

Se­nior In­ves­tiga­tive Re­porter

Shal­iza.has­sanali@guardian.co.tt

Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) chair­man Feeroz Khan says they in­tend to take a dif­fer­ent ap­proach to the con­struc­tion of new homes in the fu­ture.

“Our fu­ture con­struc­tion is go­ing to be based on con­tracts is­sued on a de­sign-build fi­nance ba­sis, where we on­ly pay for units that are de­liv­ered to us that are mort­gage-ready. That is the change. We have a list of clients who want hous­es,” Khan told Guardian Me­dia in an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view re­cent­ly.

He said the Gov­ern­ment has the T&T Mort­gage Bank (TTMB) to fa­cil­i­tate mort­gages at sub­sidised rates, so a per­son earn­ing $14,000 a month or less will qual­i­fy for a two per cent mort­gage.

Where the price of a house is less than $1 mil­lion, Khan said 100 per cent of the pur­chase price will be fund­ed by the mort­gage.

“So, our strate­gic de­ci­sion is to re­al­ly ad­dress that seg­ment of the mar­ket, with the sup­port of TTMB and oth­er fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions.”

HDC has a data­base of 200,000 ap­pli­cants await­ing pub­lic hous­ing, he said.

But not all the ap­pli­cants will qual­i­fy for a mort­gage.

Giv­ing a rea­son for the change in ap­proach, Khan said the HDC has been pay­ing $1.6 mil­lion for a home val­ued at $600,000.

“Over the last ten years, the cost of con­struc­tion has re­al­ly es­ca­lat­ed with a lev­el of mis­man­age­ment and cor­rup­tion. If that is the sce­nario, you might as well give peo­ple $1 mil­lion and for­get about con­struct­ing the house and let them build their own house be­cause we can’t be that in­ef­fi­cient and have a val­ue cre­at­ed.”

He said many con­trac­tors were al­lowed to eat at the trough and failed to de­liv­er projects on time.

“They milked the sys­tem. I can’t blame the con­trac­tors alone. The HDC al­lowed them to take ad­van­tage of the sit­u­a­tion, and projects ran late.”

The cor­po­ra­tion has been re­view­ing con­tracts to de­ter­mine which they should keep, he said.

Khan cit­ed one hous­ing project in Carlsen Field that start­ed in 2007 and is still not yet com­plet­ed.

The con­tract, which was award­ed for $360 mil­lion, had a vari­a­tion cost of $137 mil­lion.

The Gov­ern­ment will have to fork out an ad­di­tion­al $50 to $60 mil­lion to wrap up the project, Khan said.

He said the cost of a unit in that hous­ing de­vel­op­ment was ini­tial­ly priced at $400,000.

Now, the buy­ing price could be over $1 mil­lion.

“So, the Gov­ern­ment has been on the los­ing end. And that is the de­ci­sions that have got­ten us in­to this hole. We can’t con­tin­ue like this.”

Khan said the cor­po­ra­tion has be­gun to take ac­tion against some con­trac­tors who stalled work, walked out of projects with­out no­ti­fy­ing HDC and ex­e­cut­ed poor work­man­ship.

“We have rights un­der the con­tract too.”

In March, mere days be­fore the 2025 gen­er­al elec­tion, Khan said HDC award­ed 12 con­tracts to­talling $535 mil­lion “to ques­tion­able con­trac­tors, and we’ve had to look at these con­tracts, with a view to ter­mi­nat­ing them. These are con­tracts in which we paid over $5 mil­lion in ad­vanced pay­ments.”

He said HDC has been try­ing to re­cov­er that mon­ey.

Guardian Me­dia al­so What­sApped for­mer HDC chair­man Noel Gar­cia re­gard­ing Khan’s claims that sev­er­al con­tracts that came to an end were re­newed.

“As far as I am aware, there is leg­is­la­tion that gov­erns the pro­cure­ment process, and the man­age­ment of HDC would have ad­hered to the pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion,” Gar­cia said in re­sponse.

Khan al­so spoke about the $1 bil­lion that delin­quent home­own­ers owe HDC.

The ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple who have not been pay­ing the HDC are renters.

“We have to take a pol­i­cy de­ci­sion on that as well.”

Some of the rent is a mere $100 a month, with the oc­cu­pants re­fus­ing to pay for years, Khan said. He could not say how many ten­ants had fal­tered in their pay­ments.

Khan al­so said low-in­come ap­pli­cants can al­so ac­cess the Land Set­tle­ment Agency’s “Land for the Land­less” pro­gramme to have a house con­struct­ed on land pro­vid­ed by the State.