Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to your article about the serious housing shortage in the Cayman Islands. After reading it, I honestly felt worried about how the future will look like for young Caymanians.
How are young people supposed to afford a home in the future if the prices keep rising rapidly? How can families survive when rent takes up most of their salary every single month? These are real problems affecting thousands of Caymanians nationwide right now.
According to the report, the average prices for a two-bedroom apartment is now over CI$740,000. That is extremely shocking. Most regular Caymanians cannot afford prices like that, especially young people who are just starting out their lives. Many people are already struggling with the high cost of food, electricity and gas, so adding expensive rent and mortgages makes life even harder and expensive.
If the government does not act on this issue seriously, the situation could become much severe. More people could end up living in overcrowded homes, struggling financially or leaving Cayman causing a ‘brain drain’ because they simply cannot afford to live here anymore. Cayman cannot be truly successful, if people are being pushed aside.
The government and private sector need to work together to fix this major problem before it reaches a breaking point. Affordable homes must be built faster through cutting red tape and bureaucracy, and developers should be encouraged to build homes for regular working people instead of only wealthy individuals. Caymanians deserve a chance to own a home and build stable, prosperous and strong future in the country they love
This issue is not just about buildings or money. It is about people, families, and future of the Cayman society. The government and private sector must pursue reforms now before the housing crisis gets even worse.
Tony Mendez
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You have described the housing problem with precision. But why you did not assay, if not a solution, at least an approach to a solution?
We all know we cannot just dump “the housing problem” in the lap of our government.
We have to also provide a range of solutions and assess for them the relative acceptability of each one.
You must be aware the very first thought the majority of electors have when you mention solving the housing problem is that when it reduces the relative value of a built home to a smaller portion of net available income of the buyer, the private property of the elector is going to be adversely affected too.
The solution is going to be a tide that lowers all home values, to mix a metaphor or two.
So here’s a solution to which every single home owner sitting on valuable property will instantly relate to: do absolutely nothing.
Let the market take care of the problem. Let the cost of housing rise as cost of land, labor and materials increase and existing owners and voters will be happy.
After all governments cannot make materials less expensive unless they remove tax on them. They cannot make labor cheaper unless they import too much of it and they cannot sudden conjure land out of thin air especially not on a small island with limited potable water.
Now doing nothing, or doing something so ineffective that it disguises actually doing nothing, does have a slight downside. As prices rise fewer and fewer people can or will buy. If nobody is buying that cherished ultra expensive home you have two acceptable options. Don’t sell or lower the price.
Not selling means you have to either live in or rent the place out or, as so many British owning monster mansions did in the 1930’s as war tax and family war death ended their utility, put a bulldozer through them or carve them up into flats.
It quickly become apparent that of those three options the easiest, least traumatic is lower the price.
Lower the price of one home on one street or beach front and you lower them all.
There; problem solved.