PM wowed by appetite for housing in Mandeville
Published:Thursday | December 16, 2021 | 7:37 AM
Applications for residences built by the National Housing Trust (NHT) at Perth Estate in Manchester were almost 20 times capacity, an observation Prime Minister Andrew Holness cited as evidence of the huge appetite for affordable accommodations in Jamaica.
There were applications by 2,189 people for the 112 houses up for grabs at an approximate cost of J$13.9 million.
Holness emphasised that his administration was committed to providing housing at lower price points to sop up the immense demand on the market.
“Housing is a multidimensional, complex undertaking which adds greater layers of approvals and permitting, bureaucracy, and financing to ensure that when we give you a house, you are able to live in it comfortably and that investment is protected for a lifetime,” he said at Wednesday’s handover of 25 of 112 Perth Estate houses on Wednesday.
“The Government is working through all of those issues in order to build its internal capacity to rapidly increase the number of housing solutions that come to the market each year. ... In the last five years, they would have increased their output two to three, probably as much as four times over what they were producing before,” he said of state agencies such as the NHT and the Housing Agency of Jamaica.
The Government, said Holness, is mulling over leveraging the balance sheet of the NHT to provide even more housing but declined offering specifics until he could speak in depth at a later date.
Seventy-eight per cent of beneficiaries of Perth Estate units are women. The average income band of selected contributors is J$15,000-J$30,000 per week.
The new homeowners are drawn from a variety of professions, with 30 in accounting, administration, or clerical work; six in medicine; nine in the security industry; and 29 in education. The others include hotel workers, firefighters, agriculturalists, and salon operators.
Twenty-one of the beneficiaries were aged 25-40 years; 62 were between 41 and 60 years; and six were between 61 and 70.