–in bid to satisfy the growing demand for home ownership

EVEN as massive drives to develop lands already owned is being carried out by the Ministry of Housing and Water, the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) is actively pursuing land acquisition.
In a recent interview with the Guyana Chronicle, Minister within the Ministry of Housing and Water, Susan Rodrigues, shared that the CH&PA has been coordinating with several agencies, bearing in mind the government’s promise to provide 50,000 house lots in five years.
“We have to continuously acquire lands. We are in the process of looking for new areas already; we have a technical team from the CH&PA that meets with GuySuCo and NICIL that is constantly going through the motion of identifying lands across the regions that can be suitable for housing.
That’s a very tedious process because each agency has competing interest,” Minister Rodrigues explained.

JUST THE BEGINNING
But acquiring the lands is just the beginning. More than just identifying available lands, the suitability of the land for residential and commercial purposes also has to be assessed.
“We have to make sure the land is not leased land, and that the soil is suitable for housing development. The technical team is constantly looking to satisfy the bigger promise of 50, 000 lots. We have to transfer; we have to develop the plans and the housing areas and make sure we do the infrastructural work to ensure we reach that mandate,” the minister said.
The ministry has already begun to put focus on the development of those lands that it already owns. On Tuesday, in what has been described as one of the largest investments in the housing sector in one year, the government injected some $13.9 billion into the development of new infrastructure, and construction of houses, a project that is expected to benefit over 8,000 families.
But this is just a drop in the ocean of the overall 50,000 house lots that the government is aiming to see distributed over the next five years.
The ministry currently has over 60,000 applications in its system, a number that continues to grow as more and more Guyanese try to acquire their own homes. Some have been waiting for as long as a decade.
However, the minister said she will court the patience of the public as much as possible, as it takes a lot of time for these works and projects to be completed.
“People on the street say Guyana has so much land, why I can’t get my piece,” Minister Rodrigues said, adding: “It’s not that you can’t. We are trying on a daily basis so that we can produce lots for people to receive their allocation; a home to raise their family and inheritance to leave for their children but it takes time.”

In the ministry’s vision for this plan going forward, the minister said, the CH&PA is looking to take a different approach to ensuring sustainable communities, with increased focus on aspects such as zoning and better coordination between all the agencies that fall under it.

COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH
“We are adopting a comprehensive approach to housing; making sure that we have proper zoning for residential, commercial and industrial purposes, and still having ‘green’ spaces for recreational facilities, health centres, and schools,” she said.
The minister said gone will be the days when industrial buildings will be grouped in residential areas to the detriment of residents, who might be affected by any adverse activities.
“When you take up your residential area, you don’t want to live next to a bond or factory that would decrease your standard of living, so we have to protect the residential zone,” she said. “We’re making sure that none of that kind of haphazard approach happens going forward. When we’re designing our schemes, we’ll make sure that where we put the industrial zones there is a buffer area to separate it from the commercial and residential zones, so as to protect that quality of life,” she added.
Notwithstanding commercial areas needing to be separate from residential ones, Minister Rodrigues said that providing for commercial zones are a way of ensuring job creation close to the communities, and to also add to their sustainability.
“It is important to have zoning to protect residential occupancy, but to provide services residents would require,” she said.
Even as the ministry works on land acquisition and designing sustainable communities, Minister Rodrigues shared that better coordination between agencies under its aegis is also another area of emphasis. She highlighted the lack of coordination between the water utility company, the Guyana Water Inc (GWI) and the CH&PA as an area of concern that the ministry has put focus on rectifying.
“We found in a lot of the schemes that people had occupied, they were unable to build or move in because they still didn’t have their water; there was a lack of collaboration and communication between CH&PA and GWI. So GWI is catching up with CH&PA, hence we need a comprehensive approach, and to be in constant communication with the two agencies we have oversight for,” the minister said in closing.