Over the decades, the Gov­ern­ment, its hous­ing agency the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion, the ten­ants who oc­cu­py the HDC apart­ments, and the hous­ing con­trac­tors have not been able to solve the con­tin­u­ing prob­lems sur­round­ing the state-spon­sored hous­ing sec­tor.

Those chal­lenges, as re­port­ed, re­volve around the in­abil­i­ty and or the re­fusal of ten­ants to pay the rents re­quired of them for liv­ing in a prop­er­ty that has been con­struct­ed and main­tained by hun­dreds of mil­lions of tax­pay­er dol­lars.

Poor qual­i­ty con­struc­tion is of­ten raised as an is­sue by ten­ants who per­haps baulk at hav­ing to pay for what they may con­sid­er in­ad­e­quate­ly con­struct­ed and main­tained build­ings. Un­doubt­ed­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the prob­lems are that many of the ten­ants of the apart­ments are ei­ther un­em­ployed and/or un­der­em­ployed. There­fore, the lit­tle funds they earn, scrape to­geth­er or are gift­ed with, nat­u­ral­ly go to even more es­sen­tial ba­sics such as food and the pro­vi­sion for chil­dren in school and ba­si­cal­ly stay­ing alive.

There is al­so a po­lit­i­cal-so­cial re­al­i­ty. Suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments over the decades have utilised the state-con­struct­ed fa­cil­i­ties in elec­toral catch­ment ar­eas as an en­tice­ment to win votes. In in­stances, there­fore, peo­ple who ac­quire and live in such apart­ments think that their sup­port and vote for whichev­er par­ty wins of­fice is pay­ment enough for the apart­ments they oc­cu­py.

No gov­ern­ment in of­fice will, how­ev­er, ad­mit that there was some tac­it or in­deed overt agree­ment to a deal be­tween it­self and ten­ants, cur­rent or prospec­tive, to get an apart­ment in ex­change for elec­toral sup­port.

The prob­lems, how­ev­er, run even deep­er than those list­ed. The state of the econ­o­my, the avail­abil­i­ty of jobs for those who live on the mar­gins of so­ci­ety, the ca­pac­i­ty and ca­pa­bil­i­ty of many who live in the state-hous­ing apart­ments to have been pre­pared to earn a liv­ing, in­clud­ing their will­ing­ness and ef­forts to make their way suc­cess­ful­ly in the econ­o­my and so­ci­ety, are ma­jor fac­tors which all lead to the end prob­lems be­ing ex­pe­ri­enced.

An­oth­er ma­jor is­sue in­volved is the avail­abil­i­ty of hous­ing units af­ford­able to large groups of peo­ple, in­clud­ing new cou­ples set­ting off on a life. When the fig­ures are pub­lished they re­veal ra­tios of units avail­able to the re­quests for hous­ing space way out of sync with each oth­er.

“The sim­ple point be­ing made here is that there is an al­most in­ex­haustible de­mand for gov­ern­ment hous­ing which the HDC on its own can­not sat­is­fy,” said HDC Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor Jay­selle Mc­Far­lane. The es­ti­mat­ed re­quests then were 200,000 units.

To achieve some­thing close to the de­mand, the HDC over the years has re­quest­ed the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the pri­vate sec­tor in the con­struc­tion ef­fort. But as can be ex­pect­ed, for pri­vate con­trac­tors to be­come in­volved, pay­ment guar­an­tees will have to be giv­en to them. Ef­fec­tive­ly, that means the State will have to bear the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for fund­ing the de­vel­op­ment of hous­ing units.

The prob­lems do not go away, one way or the oth­er. What must al­so be fac­tored in­to the equa­tion is the im­pact the lack of ad­e­quate hous­ing has on cit­i­zens and res­i­dents. The re­al­i­ty must be that pro­duc­tiv­i­ty suf­fers, and “nowhere to place my head” must be a con­stant tor­ment on es­pe­cial­ly young fam­i­lies, their chil­dren, and their ed­u­ca­tion­al and so­cial de­vel­op­ment.

The lack of ad­e­quate and af­ford­able hous­ing is a for­mi­da­ble hin­drance to hu­man de­vel­op­ment.