Government to deliver more housing with private sector support
Published:Wednesday | March 21, 2018 | 12:00 AM
The National Housing Trust (NHT) confirmed on Wednesday that it is now ready to roll out the Government's plan to deliver more homes to Jamaicans under private-sector partnerships.
Following Tuesday's announcement by Prime Minister Andrew Holness that the NHT will be targeting private developers in a direct way, the trust's communications unit told the Financial Gleaner that the project was about the developers being more involved in providing affordable housing.
This project, the NHT said, would be accelerated in the new financial year. The incentive to private developers is that the NHT will bear market risk, purchasing units which are left unsold after a specified period.
"Essentially, under the programme, the NHT identifies parcels of land we have that we invite developers locally and overseas to come in and build on at price points that the average to low-income contributor can afford. It's really ramping up that, getting private developers involved," the trust said.
On Tuesday, Holness said that while the private sector participates in the middle, upper-middle and upper ends of the housing market "they have largely been absent from the affordable housing market, which we deem to be a market failure."
He said the Government has designed a developer's programme at the NHT whereby the private sector is invited, through a competitive process, to bid on producing affordable housing on lands owned by the NHT, according to specifications provided by the trust.
Once the developers are competitively selected and confirmed, they will be responsible for all stages of the process, from planning and approvals through to construction and completion, according to criteria laid out by the NHT.
The developers will bear the financing, construction and completion risks, and to induce their participation in this end of the market, the NHT will assume the market risk, provided that the established criteria are satisfied.
Holness said the NHT will purchase the units if they are not sold in a timely fashion.
He said "the programme will allow the NHT to bring to market more than 4,000 affordable housing solutions in the first instance than it would otherwise be unable to do on its own. The NHT will continue to develop housing solutions on its own, but this partnership allows the NHT to produce more solutions in the same period of time. In this way, we can provide a steady flow of affordable housing solutions to the market and remove the need for informal settlements".
The prime minister said that since the start of 2014, government agencies have completed approximately 8,200 housing starts.
He noted that they were already executing plans to do a total of approximately 22,000 housing starts for the four-year period to 2020. The housing starts, Holness said, will be spread "right across Jamaica".