Prefab houses due to arrive by early February

More than 200 small contractors and companies have been registered to assemble the 1 000 DuraVilla prefabricated houses which are scheduled to start arriving from Guyana by early next month.

General Manager of the state-run National Housing Corporation (NHC) Ian Cupid Gill, who made the disclosure in an interview with Barbados TODAY, said a significant number of the mostly three-bedroom homes have already been allocated.

“The process will start with 350 houses and the first set will land toward the end of January or early February. The remainder should be here between 90 to 150 days,” he said.

Gill noted that apart from the DuraVilla houses, the government-owned Hope Inc. was also constructing units here.

“Across the board for the amount of work that is being done by Hope Incorporated and the National Housing Corporation, I would safely say that just around 500 people have been approved. There are others who have been approved, but we are now preparing the lots and so on,” pointed out the NHC general manager.

“The ones that have been approved are DuraVilla houses and some would be the Hope Incorporated houses. There are two- and three-bedroom…mostly three-bedroom houses. We are seeing families grow at a significant rate. We have gone for a significant number of three-bedroom houses. For instance, of the 350 [DuraVilla] that are coming, 300 of them are three-bedroom houses,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Gill said that at least 350 to 400 lots will be prepared at Lower Burney, St Michael within the next 12 to 18 months. 

“In fact, the first 10 will be built at Clifton in St John and they have already been allocated, and then we will be building at River Crescent in St Philip. We are preparing at present 160 lots at a site opposite the Dodds Prison in St Philip. That work has started,” he stated.

With respect to plans for the coming year, Gill said the NHC was preparing to open five four-block housing units at Alleyne’s Court in White Park Road by the middle of February.

Those houses, which are part of the Government initiative announced last year to build 10 000 housing solutions within five years, were scheduled to be completed by the end of  October 2022.

Minister of Housing Dwight Sutherland had said then that the rent-to-own units will address some of the housing challenges in the urban corridor. Ten per cent of the houses will be allocated to persons with disabilities.

“What we [NHC] are involved in is a significant number of joint ventures that you will hear about over the next three to four months that will produce close to 4 000 to 5 000 of those houses,” Gill told Barbados TODAY.

“It is easier to have persons who have the financial capacity to be involved in these projects, and we will build these houses and allocate them and sell them to Barbadians.

“There are some other significant projects with other major players such as Bjorn Bjerkhamn. So we are now going through those joint ventures. It has to be a public-private sector development in order to conquer the 10 000 or at least reach that total,” Gill asserted.

He assured that the NHC will play a “strong role” in the allocation of houses to Barbadians while partnering with other entities such as Hope Inc. 

(emmanuejoseph@barbadostoday.bb)