Turnkey houses’ defects to be fully rectified by month- end

GINA, GUYANA, Monday, April 24, 2017

Recipients of the government’s turnkey houses will soon get access to their homes as the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) is currently wrapping up remedial works on defective houses.

A project of the previous administration, the turn key project came under scrutiny after defects were detected in the structures of many of the completed building, constructed at Perseverance, East Bank Demerara, even before the beneficiaries moved into their homes.

Millions of dollars were spent by the CH&PA to correct the defects to the houses. Project Manager, Kennard Dazzell told the media today, that this effort which started in September 2016, will be 100 percent completed by the end of the week. Dazzell explained that correction works had “a bit of delay over some administrative issues, but that is done, so this programme will be fully completed before the end of the week.”

The previous government had constructed approximately 200 turnkey homes at Perseverance site. As a consequence of the defects, despite allocating more than 100 percent of these homes to beneficiaries, less than 5o are occupied. All 200 of buildings would have seen some amount of corrective work being administered on them.

Dazzell explained that as the CH&PA has been correcting the defects, occupancy has been steadily increasing. “The level of occupancy has been rising, every day we have two, three persons moving in,” he said. With the 100 completion of all the works, Dazzell said that the CH&PA expects that, “we would definitely see the whole area populated with all persons (home owners) coming back on board.”

In 2011, the previous administration commenced the construction of the turn-key houses in several housing schemes, namely Providence, Eccles, Mon Repos, Good Hope, Zeelugt and Leonora. The programme had also catered for 1000 of these homes, costing $4.9M each, (the house costing $4.4M and the land costing $500,000) at Perseverance.

Only 200 of the houses were completed before developing defects such as splitting concrete walls, shifting roofs and leaky toilets and septic tanks, forcing some of the home owners to move out.

By: Macalia Santos