Con artists have found fer­tile ground for their fraud­u­lent ac­tiv­i­ties in T&T’s pub­lic hous­ing sec­tor where de­mand has been out­strip­ping sup­ply for many years. In the lat­est scam, fraud­sters have been lur­ing their vic­tims in­to hand­ing over $20,000 to $30,000 as down pay­ments for Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) units that are nev­er de­liv­ered.

In the same week that the state hous­ing agency raised an alarm about that scam, sev­er­al peo­ple who claimed they were le­gal ten­ants were evict­ed from Petrotrin bun­ga­lows at Clifton Hill, Point Fortin.

Both in­ci­dents have brought re­newed fo­cus to the acute hous­ing short­age that suc­ces­sive ad­min­is­tra­tions have been grap­pling with un­suc­cess­ful­ly since 1965. Pub­lic hous­ing is not eas­i­ly ac­ces­si­ble to the av­er­age low to mid­dle-in­come cit­i­zen who can spend decades on the HDC’s wait­ing list.

Ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion on the agency’s web­site there are cur­rent­ly more than 175,000 ap­pli­ca­tions on its data­base. With no af­ford­able op­tions on the pri­vate re­al es­tate mar­ket, a lot of peo­ple are not averse to tak­ing des­per­ate steps to “jump the queue” at the HDC, cre­at­ing the sit­u­a­tion that is reg­u­lar­ly ex­ploit­ed by fraud­sters.

Gov­ern­ment is nowhere close to sat­is­fy­ing the high hous­ing de­mand, since its lat­est pro­jec­tion, ac­cord­ing to mea­sures an­nounced in the 2021 Bud­get, is for 25,000 to be de­liv­ered over the next ten years, not all of it in the in­come cat­e­gories where there is the great­est need.

What is be­ing promised is a mix of so­lu­tions, in­clud­ing 10,000 starter homes at a cost of $250,000, 5,000 homes at a cost of be­tween $350,000 to $500,000, and an­oth­er 5,000 val­ued be­tween $650,000 and $900,000 for mid­dle-in­come buy­ers.

The chal­lenge of re­duc­ing the hous­ing short­fall and boost­ing con­struc­tion sec­tor ac­tiv­i­ty is al­so be­ing ad­dressed through two in­cen­tive pro­grammes.

The Hous­ing Con­struc­tion In­cen­tive Pro­gramme pro­vides grants of up to $100,000, or plots of land, to de­vel­op­ers who con­struct gov­ern­ment-ap­proved hous­ing units for ap­pli­cants on the HDC wait­ing list. The Aid­ed Self-Help Hous­ing Pro­gramme of­fers sub­sidised mort­gages with low-in­ter­est rates from T&T Mort­gage Fi­nance to el­i­gi­ble cit­i­zens with land ap­proved for res­i­den­tial use.

Whether these will suc­ceed when a long list of pre­vi­ous ini­tia­tives has not made in­roads in­to the huge and con­tin­u­al­ly in­creas­ing hous­ing de­mand re­mains to be seen.

How­ev­er, there re­mains an ur­gent and des­per­ate need for shel­ter that the HDC does not have the ca­pac­i­ty to meet. Re­duced gov­ern­ment spend­ing and in­creased costs for pub­lic hous­ing de­vel­op­ments, which more than tripled since 2015, make the task even more dif­fi­cult.

This is an un­ten­able sit­u­a­tion which is fur­ther ex­ac­er­bat­ed by chron­ic in­ef­fi­cien­cies and a to­tal lack of trans­paren­cy in the sys­tems for al­lo­cat­ing pub­lic hous­ing. There are still ap­pli­ca­tions in the sys­tem dat­ing back to the pre­de­ces­sor to the HDC, the Na­tion­al Hous­ing Au­thor­i­ty.

It is al­so the case that some peo­ple have been able to ex­ploit the sys­tem and gain pos­ses­sion of more than one unit which they then turn around and rent—a bla­tant con­tra­ven­tion of HDC reg­u­la­tions.

Mean­while, the list of peo­ple des­per­ate for shel­ter keeps grow­ing, pro­vid­ing easy prey for the fraud­sters.