Guysuco to sell land around city for house lots
—Outmoded laws responsible for housing problems
World Bank
Stabroek News
March 31, 2003
The Guyana Sugar Corporation (Guysuco) intends to sell part of its 29,000 acres of land around the periphery of the city for private housing development.
This is according to the World Bank report, the Guyana Public Expenditure Review (GPER). The sale would be in keeping with Guysuco’s drive to raise financing for its Skeldon Factory Project via land divestiture.
The GPER says an estimated 20% of the city population is squatting but argues that Guyana should not have a housing problem.
“Unlike many developing countries, it does not suffer from rapid population growth, massive rural-urban migration or a severe shortage of land near employment centres,” the World Bank says.
It notes the abundance of land largely owned by the government for housing development and that held by Guysuco on the periphery of the city.
The Bank argues that outmoded laws and legal procedures are primarily responsible for Guyana’s housing problems today. It points to the Public Health Ordinance, the Housing Act and the Town and Country Planning Act, all enacted in the 1930s and 1940s as constraining housing development.
It points out that developing raw land into individually titled residential lots requires a long chain of sequential actions by the Cabinet, the Central Board of Health, the Central Housing and Planning Authority, the Department of Lands and Survey, the Registry of Deeds and many other entities, each with their own competing priorities and operating procedures. The Bank notes that the procedures require official papers to pass through many hands and actions to be taken at infrequently scheduled meetings. It further notes that errors, omissions or missed deadlines anywhere in the process can create serious delays.
The Bank contends that well-intended but inappropriate housing policies have exacerbated housing shortages and contributed to the recent increase in squatting. The Bank says the very procedures intended to protect property rights and public health are instead encouraging unregulated settlement, undermining property rights, endangering public health and threatening social order.
The government housing policy has concentrated on the disposition of public housing, divestiture of government-owned land, squatter area upgrading, and crisis response in depressed area.
The government is embarking on an Inter-American Development Bank-supported US$30M low-income settlement project, which is expected to address many of the shortcomings in the system. That programme has elements of policy reform, institutional strengthening of the CH&PA and the investment in a basic package of infrastructure services. The latter includes divesting public lands for 15,000 house lots and providing them with drainage, water and roads. Additionally, 6500 squatter households would be upgraded with all households to be provided with land titles upon payment of a fee varying from US$350 for low-income households to US$4000 and above for middle-income households.
To resolve Guyana’s housing problem, the World Bank recommends the strengthening of the process for land use planning and for approving land development; auctioning raw land to developers; modernizing legislation for land-use planning and development regulation; strengthening and reorganising the CH&PA along the main lines of business and putting in place effective information and financial/accounting systems; and ensuring the effective functioning of the recently established one stop shop for developers and households.
And for the government to ensure that in providing titles to squatters it does not encourage increased squatting, the government has to be firm in promptly removing any new squatter settlement, the Bank says. It adds that to avoid perceptions of favouritism and corruption in new house lot allocation with infrastructure services, the process for allocation of titles has to be open and transparent.
