January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Government’s housing plan: As elusive as Nessie
Despite the fact that each and every Housing Minister has insisted that there is one, the PLP’s plan to provide affordable housing remains as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster. Lots of people say they’ve seen it, but no one can produce evidence of its existence.
The ‘New’ Canadian Hotel has been falling apart for a decade, and now that it is finally uninhabitable the Government is taken by surprise and needs to come up with an ‘emergency’ solution for the residents. Obviously, if a housing plan ever existed, it made no allowance for the impending and inevitable eviction of these sixty people. I guess the ‘holistic approach’ espoused by the last Minister meant, ‘full of holes’.
It’s not like they were blindsided by an unscrupulous landlord who had just chucked people out on the street. The BHC was not involved. Ted Powell has been up front about the state of things from the beginning. There is no question of ‘Irritable Powell Syndrome’.
No, a Government that actually cared about providing houses for people who aren’t Cabinet Ministers would have seen this coming eight years ago and by now would have built some high-rise apartment blocks for working people to rent. Not some half-baked, pie-in-the-sky lottery scheme to build houses on property that they don’t own. The emergency is, and always has been, the lack of affordable rental units.
The current Minister has, again, assured us that there is a plan for housing, but then he says: “It makes little sense to give people notice about what we have planned”. I see his point, if we don’t know what they intend to do there is no way they can be held accountable when they don’t do it. It’s easy to meet targets if you’re the only one who knows what they are.
Apparently there are lots of houses being withheld from the rental market and Minister Burch plans to make the owners “pay a premium” to exercise their legal rights. They’re already forgoing at least $2,000 per month rental income so my guess is that money is not the issue. Besides, blaming private citizens for the lack of housing tells me Government doesn’t really think it’s their problem to solve.
And now they’re forcing people with docks to pay rent for the use of “Government’s seabed”. Now, I don’t have a dock or even waterfront property so I’m not really affected by this, but I’m reminded of a famous quote about Nazi Germany. Something along the lines of “They came for the Jews and I said nothing since I wasn’t a Jew. They came for the homosexuals and I said nothing because I wasn’t homosexual. Eventually they came for me and there was no one left to speak up”.
So I’m speaking up. They’re not “regularizing” anything. They’re just taxing people out of spite. Next thing you know there will be a surcharge on your land tax simply because you have a view of “their” ocean. And then there’s that $2.5 million gift HSBC gave to Government for seniors’ housing. This looks to me like the first “above the table” quid pro quo for the Minister to overrule the Planning Board when it refuses to give the bank permission to build its H.S.B.C. (Huge Seven-story Banking Centre) on Front Street.
It’s not like this Government can’t find the cash for a project they like. They’ve spent almost that much refurbishing ‘Clifton’ for a Premier who says he doesn’t want to live there, after spending a similar sum to renovate a different home for Jennifer Smith when she was Premier. They even built themselves a parking lot for three hundred grand. Meanwhile hundreds of Bermudian families are looking for a place to live. And I think the real reason the PLP don’t want the Marshalls selling ‘Goldeneye’ to Oprah is that they want the property for their next Premier. Like George Jefferson, the PLP plans to keep “Movin’ on up”.[[In-content Ad]]
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