| Article Index |
|---|
| Revisit Housing Policy |
| Revist Housing Policy - Part 2 |
| Revisit Housing Policy - Part 3 |
| All Pages |
Proper housing is an essential part of decent human rights and the development of a just society. For those of us who have proper housing, we can be virtually blind to the plight of those who do not. We now have a new government—the People’s Partnership (PP)—and given the swirling claims and counter-claims around State housing, it is important to reopen this discussion.
The first aspect of housing policy to be considered would have to be the basic model: what is it?
The main housing policy of the first UNC government was to provide serviced lots, that is, land was acquired and developed with infrastructure (roads, drainage, electricity and water supplies etc,) before being distributed. That approach is based on the notion that it allowed the State to have a positive impact on the housing shortage with the use of limited resources. Between 1995 to 2001, that policy yielded a modest result, since only about 2,200 service lots were sold with 376 new homes built.2002 targets not achieved
The current national housing policy was initiated in September 2002 with the stated goal being 100,000 new homes to be built in a decade. The annual target was soon reduced to 8,000, with those new homes to be sold to applicants. The aim was to increase the quantity and quality of housing available to those who were unable to afford housing in the open market. That programme never achieved its targets and there was a consistent pattern of overstating its achievements. The last claims we heard were that the total output had been adjusted (downward, of course) from 26,000 to only 15,394 new homes in the seven-year period from 2003 to 2009.
In terms of gross output, the PNM policy easily outstripped the UNC’s, even if, in terms of its own targets, it was a signal failure. From the aspect of output versus target numbers, the results are so mixed that it is difficult to settle the question of which policy was the more successful one. For me, a key test of a housing policy’s success would have to be the number of people who have benefitted from an improvement in the quality of their housing. In that case, the existing policy is seriously wanting, since, despite the output of 15,394 new homes, most of those remain in the hands of the Housing Development Corporation (HDC). Just like with the actual numbers built, there has been a pattern of cover-up, shifting figures and plain dishonesty. Despite my efforts, I am unable to locate a published record of how many of these new homes have been given out.
Qualifying for a mortgage
Dr Roodal Moonilal, we need a clear statement of just how many new, empty homes the HDC has on its hands. I went to the 2007 conference of the Caribbean Association of Housing Finance Institutions (CASHFI). The permanent secretary of the Ministry of Housing said that a major issue was the fact that about 90 per cent of the people on their waiting list could not qualify for a mortgage. If the objective of the existing model is to promote home ownership in preference to rental units and 90 per cent of the applicants cannot afford to buy, there is a clash between those policies and the reality of the needy.
New forms of housing finance were devised to overcome that hurdle and those included mortgages:
- at 2.0 per cent;
- with zero-per cent deposits;
- even 100+per cent models which allowed the new home owner to spread the cost of appliances and furnishings over the period of the mortgage.
Return of rent control
We need to reconsider our housing policy in fundamental terms:
What is the extent of housing need in our country?
In last week’s BG View, there was a call for the national pensions proposals to be based on the results of the 2010 census.
The review of national housing policy must be based on realistic housing need data and that should also emerge from the census later this year.
In A critique of State Housing Policy, published on August 2, 2007, I proposed that our country has a five-part housing market. In my view, the task would be to determine the numbers occupying each parts and which of them we intend to provide for.
Is large-scale construction the only way to assist those in housing need?
Another aspect which needs review is the matter of rent control, since that is a cheap way of assisting those in housing need without spending vast sums of taxpayers’ dollars. The reality is that although rent control legislation remains on our law-books, the rent control boards which regulate that area of civic affairs have been allowed to wither and die. Rent control is a thorny housing policy issue, but it deserves a a second thought, since so many of our needy citizens occupy rented housing.
Are we at realistic limits in terms of tenure?
To make a simple contrast, in 1992, when United States President Bill Clinton launched his expansionary proposals to ramp-up home-ownership, about 62 per cent of the homes in the US were owner-occupied. At the end of 2008, after a massive and disastrous experiment intended to increase home ownership, about 68 per cent of US homes were owner-occupied. Our current home ownership percentage is about 76 per cent. Given the poverty of those on the waiting list, does it really makes sense to keep on building new homes for sale to poor people? Are we at the “limits to growth” where home-ownership is concerned?
What types of homes should we build?
Large swathes of agricultural land have been “paved-over” to build these new homes, which is to the permanent detriment of our food security, to name just one obvious concern. The fact is that we do not have enough land in this country to continue that pattern of large scale development.
Key points:
Cheaper government houses in the June 27 Sunday Guardian featured an interview with Dr Roodal Moonilal, Minister of Housing and the Environment. The minister touched on some of the key issues and confirmed that “Some people simply cannot afford the market value of the homes. As a result, the Government is looking to provide a further subsidy to assist with the purchasing of homes. I intend to take a proposal to Cabinet to consider the price reduction of the housing units.”
There was no mention of rented housing in that article. It seems that the new minister has adopted the existing policy of preferring to sell the new homes built by the Housing Development Corporation (HDC). In addition, he is proposing to increase the housing subsidy. An important correction is that HDC houses are not sold at “market value” as the minister implied. Market value is the amount the new home could sell for on the open market and the HDC offers the new homes to applicants at a lower price.
What is housing subsidy?
This is an important aspect of the housing policy discussion and these are the basic points:
1. Public funding: To create new homes, the HDC has to spend public money for land acquisition, professional fees and cost of construction. These are “first costs” for new homes, but there are other significant costs of getting a needy family to move in.
2. Housing subsidy: For example, if the market value of a new HDC home is $900,000 and those homes are sold to applicants for $425,000, the housing subsidy in that case is $475,000. Please note that I am not relating the sale price to the cost of production of the new home. That is a mistaken approach, because it ignores the opportunity cost of the investment decision to sell at that reduced price. Effectively, this ignores the market to the detriment of the taxpayer. Even in the case of rented housing, the same basis would apply, with the difference between the market rent and the actual rent being the weekly housing subsidy.
3. The allocation of housing subsidy: Fidelis Heights at Bates Trace in St Augustine is a new HDC development of townhouses near to UWI. In my view, the homes there are middle-income units which should not have been built by the HDC. In that case, the housing subsidy per unit is in excess of $850,000. In view of the desperate national housing shortage and the scarcity of resources, it was a grievious misallocation of both public capital and housing subsidy to have embarked on this scheme. In the examples, cited by the new minister, the housing subsidy is far lower.
The people who purchased units at Fidelis Heights got them at between $780,000 to $900,000.
I am also aware that those homes were allocated without reference to housing need, ie, some of the new homes went to single people, without children. To put it plainly, there is no case for allocating $850,000 in housing subsidy to a single household, when there are others in greater need, who are not catered for by the system. There is a very poor quality of discussion on the issue of housing subsidy. That is because of the system of cost-based pricing, as mentioned above, which error is compounded by the sparse references in the official statistics.
I have only been able to unearth a single official attempt to quantify housing subsidy in the 2010 Draft Estimates of Development Programme [PDF], Provision of Housing Subsidies at Greenfield, sites is stated, at line H 003 to be $3,058,863. I am not saying that there is a poor understanding of the role of housing subsidy. That would be untrue, since the people who are manipulating the system all understand the real value of housing subsidy very well.
4. Rent control: Rent subsidies for tertiary students, also in Sunday’s Guardian, featured a discussion on the housing situation affecting 14,000 UWI students, Fazil Karim, Minister of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education (MSTTE), is reported to have said “...while the university has established mechanisms to register landlords, “there exist no mechanisms to monitor prices, ensure quality accommodation, minimise security anxiety or seek the interests of the landlords and students.”
In the near future, Karim said this ministry and the Health Ministry will establish a committee that will make recommendations to establish mechanisms for the provision of subsidies “on rents to all students residing in the region and who are registered at tertiary institutions in the area.”
It seems from his statements that the Tertiary Education Ministry is proposing a rental subsidy to all tertiary students, whatever their means. In a situation of scarce resources, that type of policy can have inequitable consequences, since some of these students are not needy at all.
The Minister of Legal Affairs, Prakash Ramadhar, attending as MP for the area, said: “...what adds to the problem is the lapsing by the Rent Assessment Board. “We nationally had to debate the issue if this country would go into a free market in terms of rent or rent restriction.” Ramadhar said he would like to see free market forces determine rents.” So here we have the paradox deepening, with the minister responsible for the rent control system seeming to say that he is against those controls. The outlook for the state’s intervention into the housing arena is confusing, to say the least. Confusion is the ideal atmosphere to breed under-performance and corruption. Our needy citizens deserve better. This entire debate should be to create reasonable, redistributive and sustainable housing policies for our nation. The allocation of scarce housing subsidy must be reported and improved, so that the most needy receive the most subsidy.
Next week, we expand to include questions as to how many of the HDC houses are occupied by the legitimate tenants? Are steps being taken to deal with those who have broken the terms of their tenancy? Also, some discussion on the use of re-purchase schemes as another way to create extra units of housing.
The numbers’ game:
Last week’s column asked Moonilal to specify how many new homes were empty at this time and it was very disappointing to read that “...approximately 10,000 homes, including defective units, are unoccupied...” The new administration has to strive to do better than the one they just replaced and it is just not acceptable that the HDC cannot (or will not?) report on an elementary matter like this.
Last week’s column delved into the vital issue of housing subsidy and its mis-allocation. This week, I will set out some suggestions as to how this wrong-headed allocation of public subsidy might be re-oriented to better serve our needy citizens. The existing system is fundamentally flawed and in urgent need of reform, if we are to better apply the limited quantities of housing subsidy to the nation’s real housing needs. In order to create a more effective and transparent equation for the allocation of housing subsidy we need to establish three things. Those are the quantity of housing subsidy which is available for the State to dispense; the housing need of those on the HDC waiting list and the housing quality of the new units produced by the HDC, since those ought to be raising the general standard of housing accommodation.
The key point here is that there is only limited housing subsidy available and a clear choice has to be made as to its allocation. That choice has been made under the existing policy which, in my view, is inequitable and counter-productive. If we accept that the proper measure of a successful housing policy is needy families moving into new HDC homes which improve their living conditions, we also need to accept that a policy which can generate more than 10,000 empty homes is a failure. A supplementary point is that if we are spending vast sums to build new homes, we also need to obtain a measurable improvement in the nation’s housing standards.
The main points could be outlined in this way:
Housing subsidy: First of all, we need to establish the quantity of housing subsidy the State is prepared to dispense. That can be determined by the sale of the new homes, as recently proposed by Minister Roodal Moonilal. The figure here being the difference between the market value of the new homes and the HDC’s sale price. I am of the view that we are at, or very close to, the ceiling as to the national percentage of home-ownership. Another approach would be to establish the difference between the market rental value of the HDC units and the rents affordable to the applicants on the waiting list. That figure can be capitalised to allow comparison between the policy choices. The proposed effort to sell the new homes will in fact be inimical, since it will have the effect of decreasing the amount of housing subsidy available to those who cannot afford to buy. In other words, the neediest people on the waiting list are being discriminated against by the policy of the HDC.
Housing need index (HNI): We need to develop a framework for measuring the housing need of applicants for HDC housing. That analysis would need to include such items as size of the family, family income and their living conditions, as well as any special needs such as disabilities and the location of the extended family. The United Kingdom’s Department of the Environment and its implementing agency, The Housing Corporation, have already done substantial work in developing the HNI as a means of properly allocating State funding for housing across the nation. The United States’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has also done considerable work on this complex series of questions.
Housing quality index: In 1993 I proposed a housing quality index for the UK, which would have been a tool for measuring how effectively the state funding had been applied in creating good quality housing. The main elements of my proposal were to measure the quality of design of and amenity provided by new homes. The Housing Corporation’s approach to this can be viewed at [PDF], see also this view from the UK’s Homes and Communities Agency (HCA). Training is available at the Housing Quality Network.
We need to allocate the limited housing subsidy to those in the greatest need. That is the only reasonable policy for this critical area of national development. That can only proceed properly on the basis of understanding the parts of the puzzle. Anything other than a comprehensive review of these wrong-headed policies is a recipe for more waste and empty homes. Which brings me to an issue raised in last week’s column; the incidence of “policy silos.” That phrase—policy silos—refers to a condition in which the activities of various State agencies impinge on the same issues and yet, incredibly, there seems to be scant, if any, co-ordination between those agencies.
The aspects addressed last week can be summarised as:
- Minister Moonilal, making extensive statements on the sale of new homes, but being silent on the burning issue of new homes for rent. Silence as to the greater area of need, alongside ambitious proposals to advance futile policies in favour of the less-needy.
- The Minister of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education (MSTTE), Fazal Karim, proposes blanket rental subsidies for students in tertiary education.
- The Legal Affairs Minister, Prakash Ramadhar, who is responsible for the rent control system, declares that he prefers that rents be determined by market forces.
Those are exactly the policy silos we need to dismantle if we are to make any real progress on these vital issues.
Minister Moonilal should take the lead on this issue by convening a symposium or conference to debate these issues and establish some kind of policy consensus. We cannot continue this way.
- We need to go beyond the numbers game of billions spent, jobs created and new homes built.
- We need to move to a new, clear space where our national housing policy is declared as existing to improve the living conditions of our neediest citizens.
- We need to move beyond the narrow perspectives which glorify home-ownership as the only correct answer. There are many productive and honest families, in advanced countries, who never own a home. They are no less worthwhile than those of us who are home-owners.
Most of all, Minister Moonilal should take urgent steps to distribute the “approximately 10,000” homes to the most needy.
Repurchase programmes:
There ought to be a programme for those people who have HDC homes and no longer need them. That programme would offer a cash payment to those HDC tenants who vacated their units. That would have the practical effect of releasing additional housing units to the HDC without the expense and delay of having to construct new ones.
Afra Raymond is managing director of Raymond & Pierre Ltd and president of the Institute of Surveyors of T&T.
By: Afra Raymond
Via: Trinidad Guardian [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]