Authorities going after persons with two Govt. houselots

Jun 14, 2017 News

The Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) has announced a campaign to go after those persons, who, in an attempt to defraud the system obtained more than one government house lot.

CH&PA’s Operation Director, Denise Tudor-King

Based on CH&PA’s allocation policy, a person is only entitled to own one property or lot from the government.
CH&PA’s Operation Director, Denise King-Tudor, according to a government release, explained once the authority establishes that someone is the owner of more than one government house lot, they will move to repossess one of the lots, in accordance with their repossession policy.
“Sometime you find instances, where persons change their names (to obtain a lot) or they use another name or they are already married to someone and our policies say that if you are married or not if your spouse should own then you are not eligible to the government’s housing programme,” King-Tudor explained.
She said that these instances are either reported to the CH&PA by concerned citizens; in other instances, it is unearthed and there are cases where persons report this information, when the authority conducts data cleansing.
“We will find that persons in Region Five or Six, they acquire a lot in Region Four and so once we would have established that and we would have done our research and assessment of the situation, we would determine which one the properties that person should have,” King-Tudor explained.
In determining which of the lots that the person should be left with, the CH&PA said it takes into consideration such ramifications as the investment made and where the persons actually work and reside, Tudor-King said.
“You would find that if that person would have acquired a house lot in Region Six and Region Four, because maybe there is a shift in where they work, they have constructed on the lot in Region Four, and so we would repossess the lot in Region Six,” she explained.
Concerns over the approximately 25,000 applications on file, has led the CH&PA to be reviewing some of the mechanisms used to enable home ownership. It also has the authority reviewing the use of those lands that were disbursed to private and other landowners, but to date remain undeveloped.
In addition to using these lands to meet the huge demand for house lots, the authority may also seek in the future to utilise them, to expand their pilot project of constructing apartments, condominiums, and wooden houses for Guyanese that are within the low to middle-income brackets.