Hope Estate Project
to get started May 5
BELVEDERE--The preparatory groundwork for the 72 Hope Estate apartments will commence on May 5 with contractor Paradise Design Development N.V. cleaning and clearing the land.
St. Maarten Housing Development Foundation Director Michael Fowler recently told The Daily Herald that the project, with a price tag of NAf. 7.2 million, will quench only a small amount of the needed affordable housing units.
Apartments have already been allotted to Sister Basilia Centre clients, who have been deemed able to live alone and unassisted, and to some seniors citizens. The other apartments will be allocated to people high on the housing needs list kept by the foundation. This list has over 900 applicants with 170 of these living in dire circumstances.
To get the Hope Estate project off the ground, people who had been squatting on the land were asked to leave. Not wanting to create homeless families, the foundation along with Housing Commissioner Theo Heyliger had helped several of them to find accommodations.
Some of the dislocated people had opted to stay with family members and, in some instances, the foundation had made the house more liveable for the family by completing a room or repairing a roof. Of the fifteen households, two have elected to stay on the property “until the bulldozers come,” according to Fowler. The other households had been “very cooperative.”
All of the families were added to the foundation’s waiting list and will be allotted an apartment based on the urgency of their needs and availability of units within Belvedere, the mobile home communities and Hope Estate, when this is completed
The Hope Estate project, which was met with some resistance from area residents when it had been first announced last year, is funded by the Harbour Buyback Funds via the Netherlands Antilles Implementing Foundation USONA.
