Briceño Administration Wants to Ramp up MIDH Housing Project

Prime Minister John Briceño

And, with a commitment to build ten thousand homes for Belizeans, Prime Minister John Briceño says Cabinet is looking at ways to increase funding for the Ministry of Infrastructure Development’s housing program. He says the funds may come by way of a restructuring of capital two expenditures or a loan from the Korean Government through CABEI. Here is how he explained it.

Prime Minister John Briceño

“Just yesterday in Cabinet, Minister Espat was bringing up the issue that they need more funding; because the kind of spending we do we build good quality starter homes for people with the plan to be able to expand to two or three bedrooms in the future. And yet, the home owner, in most instances, we try to target single mothers or people that are really poor for them to be able to own a home and all they have to pay a hundred dollars a month for ten years. So in effect they pay about twelve thousand dollars and the government also has to subsidize it. We want to do more of that and we want to do it in our means. So we have to look at what we have as capital two funding and the discussion we had yesterday we want to look at where we have been spending capital two budget for the last two years and in the new budget decide where we want to shift our money and if housing has to be one of them then the pie is limited. So we will have to take away from something to put it there. Or you could have access to low cost funding at a certain percent or the Korean Government has a fund at CABEI where we have been granted access. It is at zero point zero one percent to be paid over twenty years. If we can qualify for housing under that funding they have available we want to borrow from that to speed up the housing program.”