Undone work on Greens houses

OPPOSITION Leader Mia Mottley says some of the building work for National Housing Corporation (NHC) units at Greens, St George, is unacceptable.Yesterday, Mottley, accompanied by Deputy Opposition Leader Dale Marshall, Christ Church West Member of Parliament William Duguid, and former Cabinet ministers Noel Lynch and Trevor Prescod, toured the housing project and expressed concern over the construction work.Mottley told the Weekend NATION, the houses for low-income earners had supposedly been completed for more than a year, remained vacant and work was not completed.No accessShe said that some of the houses had “rent-to-own” arrangements and some people might have started to pay but had not been able to get access to them.“This is not a gift. People are paying money. There is no water meter, there is no driveway, there is no accommodation for the disabled . . . all of these things have been left undone but yet low-income workers who are purchasing these houses have now to move in and find the wherewithal to raise the money while they camp out in the houses,” she said.Duguid lambasted the housing conditions, and was of the view the units were only 80 per cent complete.“When I look around, in none of the units has water been connected. There are no kitchen or bedroom cupboards, no solar water heater, no driveway . . . . People have to park on the road, because they can’t park off the road because it is on a slope.Can’t get in“It means that when two cars park at the top, all of the rest at the bottom can’t get in, so I would be surprised to see that the town planners actually give a certificate of compliance for any of these houses without an appropriate driveway,” he said.Mottley pointed to cracks in some of the houses and said much had to be done to make the units liveable.“If and when the cracks open up again who is going to be responsible for fixing it? Are you going to ask the same families who are in here to fix it?”The Opposition Leader said this was an example of how taxpayers money could be wasted.“I didn’t know that we had a luxury of houses that we could have people not been able to move into houses that were on the verge of being finished and for the minister to say that conveyancing has to be done. . . . conveyancing doesn’t take a year.” (MK)