The National Plan for Happy Family Homes it is proposed to build four thousand room solutions this year with the help of the private sector, to improve the quality of life of thousands of Dominicans and reduce the housing deficit that exceeds one million units.
The Minister of the Presidency, Lisandro Macarrullaby participating in the Free Dialoguereported that it is an innovative plan that had never been implemented in the country and to which the government is putting all its will as a way of leveling the opportunity so that the lower-income sectors can have access to decent housing.
He stated that the two main obstacles for the poorest people to have access to housing were the initial payment and the cost of financing.
“What has the State done? Having identified these two lines, which excluded an important sector of society from the opportunity or from that great need, because having their own home is a necessity, then we decided to accompany the citizen by contributing part of the and subsidizing the bank interest rate”, said the official.
Despite the fact that next April will be a year since the project began, only 95 homes have been delivered out of a total of 320,000 applications that have been received, and Minister Macarrulla attributes the situation to different factors, but mainly to the economic limitation of the State, however, affirmed that a lot of effort is being put into developing the project.
He argued that the novelty of this plan is that the State does not give the home to the purchaser as was done before, but that people have to buy it and their property title is given to them so that it is subject to credit.
“Now, no government has previously had a housing program as aggressive as the one we have,” said Macarrulla, and added that the purchasers are involved so that they make a sacrifice to achieve their home and thus value it more.
Houses are currently being built in Higüey, Baní, Los Alcarrizos and San Isidro. To these solutions are added the 95 that were already delivered in Azua. “This model was previously designed, adapting it to the economic and social reality of that segment of society, with designs according to their needs, made of reinforced concrete, with all the details, removing them from vulnerable areas.”
Macarrulla reported that a series of parameters were established to select the most suitable people through the “Get over yourself” program, which is the one that purges the person, who must have very particular socioeconomic conditions in order to have the benefits. For example, a rich, a middle class person or unemployed apply.
City Juan Bosch
Minister Macarrulla unties the National Plan for Happy Family Homes of the project City Juan Bosch that contemplates the construction of 25,000 houses, which the last government began and which was supposedly paralyzed, but which this administration reactivated.
He assured that those 25,000 homes, the authorities together with the promoters they contemplate finishing them in the present four-year period. “There it ends City Juan Boschwhich is a specific project, unless there is a different policy”, he commented.
Camel Curi Lora, Vice Minister of Investment Projects of the Ministry of the Presidency, accompanied Macarrulla in the Free Dialogue and said that at the beginning of the current government, 6,500 homes had been completed and there are now 9,000.
He indicated that all the projects were stalled, they were restarted and they contemplate concluding infrastructure works such as the road, electrical part and for next year it is projected to finish the aqueduct and the water tanks to have all the works in development process, including those that are still up for bid.
shadow toll
The Minister of the Presidency also spoke about the government’s decision to put an end to the concession contract for the Autopista del Nordeste or Juan Pablo II and the collection of tolls, and said that the greatest kindness has not been to lower the toll, which was done in 20%, but what it means for the economy to have terminated that contract.
“The greatest goodness is what the State is saving with the shadow toll, which varied because it depended on the number of vehicles that passed… but the goodness of that decision is the shadow toll because the toll was not only what the citizen paid , it was what the citizen paid plus the shadow toll paid by the State”.
He recalled that those millions of pesos that were paid annually were from the treasury, public funds and that the country is currently saving money.
“Then the population has to see what is being saved because here we believe that this money is produced by someone else, we are the ones who produce it, that is why people have to do what they are doing to us, watching us. People have to empower themselves with that,” said Macarrulla.
The official said that the money collected from tolls on the Autopista del Nordeste is income that is contemplated in the trust created by the previous government and that the current administration has given it continuity and, above all, has strengthened it.
The Minister of the Presidency, Lisandro Macarulla, affirmed that the National System for Attention to Emergencies and Security 9-1-1 has managed to reduce the average arrival time of ambulances from 24 to 18 minutes and that the service is already at 94 % of the national territory. “Everything here is politicized and that is unfortunate, that is, it is not true that the response capacity is slower than before, what is true is that we reached a greater number of provinces, what is true is that there were a deficit of 300 ambulances,” he said. He stated that when they came to power they found a deficit of 300 ambulances nationwide and seven border provinces that had nothing and an additional six that did not have the service in operation either. “We immediately identified those needs, we began the process of purchasing ambulances in the midst of the pandemic, there was not an ambulance in the entire world and do you know when we began to receive those ambulances that we bought? This month by drops, because ambulances are already appearing worldwide, but with the help of the Red Cross”. He assured that they have improved the management of the system with the implementation of technology to identify the hot areas where more events take place, more demands for ambulances and he gave as an example that before the ambulance units were in a perimeter and with the hot areas they realized that on weekends the units are in greater demand on the beaches. He maintained that in order to improve the service, 500 carkits were donated to the Police, 120 of which are already installed with internal and external cameras, a tablet, a radio telephone, and a GPS. He recognized that the Police is the institution that has the most backwardness in the system because it is present in all the events of the service.
Deputy Minister Camel Curi
The Vice Minister of Investment Projects of the Presidency, Camel Curi Lorasaid that they have managed to link and articulate the private sector in the Happy Family Housing project because in principle the promoters they were not interested in making investments in the sector in the way that it was done.
“We had, together with the financial sector, to develop products that were suitable for that family, just as for the construction sector, it was not attractive either because it was a system, a type of business totally different from what they were traditionally used to doing. ”.
