THE Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) is urging persons who would have uplifted applications from the Adequate Housing and Urban Accessibility Programme, to return same on or before February 1st, 2019.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, Deputy Director of Community Development, Donnel Bess-Bascom said that one of the concerns they have had with the programme is that while persons have been uplifting the application forms in great numbers, there has been a slow return rate of the applications.

To address this, she said the CH&PA has taken an approach to get the applications closer to the communities and over the past week, has held a total of five outreach activities.
This, she said, has resulted in an increase in the applications being issued and an increase in the return rate.

“We would have seen a total of 413 applications coming in directly from those outreaches and 65 per cent return rate, which has brought us up to a total number of 1770 applications issued and 503 returned,” Bascom said.

She said that they are pleased to see the improvement in the return rate of applications, but are urging more persons to pursue this aggressively and have their documentations up to date.

This programme was launched in October of last year and is specifically for persons living on or below the poverty line (a total household income of $75,000 or less) within sections of Regions Four and Three.

The boundary covers La Bonne Intention (LBI) on the East Coast of Demerara (ECD), and Georgetown to Great Diamond on the East Bank of Demerara (EBD) and La Parfaite Harmonie on the West Bank of Demerara (WBD). The programme is being implemented by the Ministry of Communities through the CH&PA with funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Bess-Bascom explained that the Adequate Housing and Urban Accessibility Programme has three components – Affordable and Sustainable Housing; Consolidation of existing Housing Schemes; and Support and Institutional Strengthening.

Addressing the adequate and affordable housing component, she said that it has a value of 10 million US dollars and it speaks to the implementation of core home support and the home improvement subsidy.

CH&PA will be issuing 250 core homes and disbursing 2000 home improvement subsidies under the programme.

She also highlighted that the return rate for the subsidy is 40 per cent greater than that of the core homes. However, they have a major challenge with ownership documents of the applicant.

“One of the requirements of the programme is that you present ownership documents in the form of a title or transport where it exists. Once there is an agreement of sale, that can also be considered. The ownership document is critical in becoming eligible to participate. You must be the owner of the property and you must be living there,” Bess-Bascom stressed.

She said they have also made available applications at all the local democratic organs within the project boundary so as to have the application and return process move at a faster rate.