Opposition says government needs concrete plan for ‘housing crisis’

Opposition leaders have raised concerns over how quickly new affordable homes are being provided for those who need them by the National Coalition for Caymanians government, saying that a previous administration was providing three to four times as many.

Appearing on Compass TV’s Forefront programme, opposition leader Joey Hew, who was part of the PPM government that lost office in 2021, said that “when we demitted office, the waiting list was 400 and we were producing about 40 to 50 homes per year at that time. I have the statistics. It was widely debated during the elections. I put a parliamentary question to the minister in March asking, ‘How many homes have been occupied since January 1, 2025?’ The response was 13 – 13 in one year.”

Waiting list

Last year, housing minister Jay Ebanks told Parliament that as of 30 Sept. there were 1,152 active applications on the affordable housing waiting list of the National Housing Development Trust, representing 2,200 Caymanians.

Last month, the 376-page “Public and Affordable Housing Policy and 10-Year Strategic Plan” report was tabled in Parliament and warned that Cayman must triple its rate of housing construction over the next decade just to keep up with population growth.

The report said that demand for homes was currently far outstripping supply and that existing government policy has made things worse, with the private sector heavily focused on the upper end of the market and no incentive to build less expensive homes.

Hew said, “You can’t do it with 13 homes, and then all of the excitement and the celebration around the report and the housing plan, they called it. It wasn’t a plan; it had no targets, it had no timelines, there was no certainties in it, there was no budget in it.”

He went on to accuse the government of putting bureaucracy ahead of a concrete plan.

“Talking about creating an authority and all sorts of changing laws and stuff … a strategy without quantified outputs is not a plan,” he said, “It is a strategic policy statement. It’s a framework document. It is not a plan. We are asking for a plan.”

Deputy opposition leader Kenneth Byran, appearing alongside Hew, agreed that many of the current problems had been around for a while, since when he was in office, but that they were yet to be solved.

“We still have a housing crisis, and I can’t say that outside of identifying the problem – we seem to have a master’s degree in identifying problems – we can’t get a high school diploma and solve any of them,” Bryan said. “I don’t know where we’re going to be, come 2029, in respect to solving the housing issue.”