FIJI needs about 1600 new homes a year for the next 30 years, but the Housing Authority delivered only 368 homes and serviced lots in the last financial year.
This was shared by Hibiscus Festival contestant, Miss MHCC and Carpenters Tower Sala Korosaya, while presenting her research on affordable housing during the private judging segment yesterday.
“Five Housing Authority projects will spend $248million,” she said.
“That works out at $83,000 a lot, while the families it is built for earn under $30,000 a year.”
She cited Housing Authority data showing the first 31 families at Nepani averaged $28,814 a year, with 68 per cent earning up to $30,000.
“And they cannot borrow, because you cannot mortgage land you occupy on a handshake.”
“Government holds development leases over 48 informal settlements, 44 sit on iTaukei land, 14 of those leases have expired. The landowners will not renew, because they were paid and then nothing was built.”
She said 350 serviced plots were laid out at Waila, but when researchers visited, only two had dwellings and both were abandoned. Beside that site was a full squatter settlement.
“Service the land before the crisis arrives, and where families already live with the landowners’ blessing, register it, so the family can build and the vanua gets paid.”
Ms Korosaya also linked housing pressure to climate displacement, citing a Government of Fiji and World Bank report estimating 25,700 Fijians are pushed into poverty each year by cyclones and floods.
“They move to the edges of our capital city, where informal settlements now exist.”
She gave Koroipita in Lautoka as an example of what works. The village leased land for 99 years, services went in first, and after Cyclone Winston none of the 230 houses sustained significant damage.
Ms Korosaya also conducted an informal poll of about 100 people in greater Suva. She stressed it was not a representative survey.
“Almost none owned anything. One woman said everything she earns goes to a roof over her children, and she will retire with no house to her name. She was not asking for charity. She was asking for ground that belongs to someone she knows.”
