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Friday, July 11, 2025

PM warns bad pay HDC tenants again

Pay rent or we’ll evict you

by

Shaliza Hassanali
2398 days ago
20181217

With some 3,000 Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) ten­ants and home­own­ers ow­ing some $120 mil­lion in out­stand­ing ar­rears, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has warned delin­quent oc­cu­piers to ei­ther pay up or they will face evic­tion.

Row­ley made the com­ment as he de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at a key dis­tri­b­u­tion cer­e­mo­ny at the Vieux Fort Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment in St James on Mon­day. Of the 137 three-bed­room units built, keys were dis­trib­uted to 48 new home­own­ers on the eve of Christ­mas.

The HDC has 50,000 reg­is­tered home­own­ers in their sys­tem.

Row­ley said it was not sur­pris­ing that peo­ple be­have hum­ble and com­pli­ant when they want a house, but not­ed that once they re­ceive their keys “they turn beast.” How­ev­er, he urged them to change their at­ti­tude, im­prove their qual­i­ty of life and live up to their re­spon­si­bil­i­ty by pay­ing their rent in a time­ly man­ner.

He ap­pealed to ten­ants to make rent a pri­or­i­ty, not­ing that some home­own­ers have been delin­quent for months.

“I am putting you on no­tice that the way we are run­ning this coun­try now… if you don’t dis­charge your re­spon­si­bil­i­ty the Gov­ern­ment will dis­charge its re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to the rest of the coun­try. If you don’t pay your rent we will put you out,” Row­ley said.

“There is no chance that should be that you could cor­rupt HDC staff by giv­ing you a bligh. There is no bligh to be had. You got a house you now have se­ri­ous re­spon­si­bil­i­ties.”

Hous­ing Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon al­so plead­ed with the home­own­ers to pay their rent.

“I can tell you we have a num­ber of delin­quent home­own­ers through­out the HDC de­vel­op­ments in Trinidad and To­ba­go and we in­tend to take a very ag­gres­sive ap­proach come Jan­u­ary 2019. You can’t have a brand new mo­tor car and you own­ing rent. You can’t have ca­ble TV and you own­ing rent,” Dil­lon point­ed out.

Port-of-Spain MP Mar­lene Mc­Don­ald al­so re­mind­ed home­own­ers that the homes they re­ceived “are not free.”

Fol­low­ing the key dis­tri­b­u­tion func­tion, Dil­lon told re­porters there were too many delin­quent HDC ten­ants but could not say how many were ow­ing and the sum in­volved. He said the delin­quen­cy has been on­go­ing for years, al­though the HDC has been dis­trib­ut­ing no­tices to delin­quent home­own­ers and ten­ants dai­ly.

In terms of im­ple­ment­ing mea­sures for home­own­ers to set­tle their out­stand­ing pay­ments, Dil­lon said the HDC has be­gun an au­dit as some peo­ple had moved in­to de­vel­op­ments with­out per­mis­sion, which they would not tol­er­ate.

“We are go­ing to work with you. We are not go­ing to put you out. We will al­low you some kind of dis­cre­tion to pay your rent,” Dil­lon said, adding the HDC would still in­sti­tute a grace pe­ri­od for home­own­ers/ten­ants who fail to pay their rent or mort­gages.

“Once we start a grace pe­ri­od you know what hap­pens,” Dil­lon said, adding some home­own­ers had their pri­or­i­ties mixed up.

HDC’s man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Brent Lyons ad­mit­ted the HDC was owed $120 mil­lion by 3,000 home­own­ers.

“This is a re­volv­ing fig­ure. It (fig­ure) goes up and down,” he said.

Lyons said every day the HDC sends out no­tices to delin­quent home­own­ers through its debt re­cov­ery unit to pay.

In some in­stances, Lyons said some home­own­ers had not paid HDC in ten years. He said the moun­tain of ar­rears was wor­ry­ing to HDC.

“We need to col­lect as much rev­enue as pos­si­ble. Any rev­enue that we do not col­lect hin­ders our op­er­a­tions. We can’t con­tin­ue to con­done it.”

He said while home­own­ers may face some chal­lenges at times they could come in and work out a new pay­ment plan.

While HDC has failed to en­force evic­tion on delin­quent oc­cu­piers, Lyons said when they re­sort to a stage of putting peo­ple out of their homes “it’s a stage where we have tried all that we have tried and it can­not be helped at that stage.”

Lyons said the PM has giv­en the HDC sup­port to evict delin­quents, adding up to now they had on­ly evict­ed home­own­ers for bad be­hav­iour and il­le­gal oc­cu­pa­tion.


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