Poor Jamaicans deserve decent housing too
Dear Editor,
I am bitterly disappointed, and even angry, at a suggestion made this week that the only way that the National Housing Trust (NHT) can help poorer Jamaicans is through subsidised rents.
Why is it that the poor should not be owners of property? Do they not deserve to own decent housing that would help to make their children turn out healthy and smart, eventually cutting crime to a minimum and making Jamaica what Vision 2030 suggests is possible?
The ruling class blames the poor for being poor, and despises them so much that any help offered to the poor is seen as pandering to what are seen as negative behaviours. It reminds me of how orphans were treated as vermin in Britain, until just over a 100 years ago, and how our own Jamaicans were treated until 1838, or should that be 1938?
Food For the Poor and Habitat for Humanity have been offering low-cost housing solutions for years, and so did Operation Pride with its one-room starter homes, many of which have been expanded into semi-mansions.
I’ve just been checking through a Google search on low-cost housing solutions, and there are ideas in abundance. Land is not the problem, as it is available in rural areas in abundance and in Kingston, where there are large open areas in some places and many abandoned lots which could be cleared for housing.
The NHT has ample funds to put in the necessary infrastructure while the Government land itself (some taken from delinquent private owners) should, given our African heritage, be provided free where the need is proven.
We need to treat everyone as deserving, unlike the treatment meted out to our disadvantaged and neglected inner-city residents. Building houses for the less well-off, with sweat equity where feasible, could not be a better project for Jamaica. It will generate jobs galore (simple houses do not need professional developers), pride of ownership, better living conditions, better health (physical and mental), better-functioning families, less crime… the list goes on.
The billions of dollars taken from the NHT by the Government over the last four years could have provided 90,000 grant loans of $500,000, in turn housing three or four times that number of our fellow Jamaicans .
Paul Ward
pgward72@gmail.com
