Post Courier 22 August 2011 "Houseless".
The rental rates of real estate and property owners are very high. The minimum rate currently available is around K500 a week to K5000 a week the highest. You get a single room for K300 a week.
Many senior public servants and company employees cannot afford this rate with their allowances. If they risk it, they will have no food on the table. This is not to mention the majority of middle class workers.
The housing situation gives rise to social and urban problems. I urge the Government to:
(1) regulate the rental fees set by real estate and property owners to an affordable rate,
(2) review and increase the housing allowance for public servants
(3) direct or propose to Ministers to institute a housing scheme for public servants,
(4) make land available to public servants to apply for and start building,
(5) encourage banking loans for housing.
COMMENT: The housing situation is so bad that senior workers in Government and business are living in squatter settlements. Even there the rent for a single bush timber room is increasingly high.
Life is not good for families in squatter settlements. The houses are of poor quality. Security is low. There is no water laid on but a single water point often for hundreds of people. Toilets have to be dug.
There is a line up for filling containers of water much like the line at the Bank South Pacific. These are illegal connections that cause Eda Ranu to come to cut the water from time to time.
Parents find difficulties with families of children coming as strangers into a squatter settlement. There is a crime rate among the people living there that comes from poverty.
There is a squatter settlement at Erima on the ridge line above the statue of the Bird of Paradise. Every weekend we hear the loud sounds coming from the church services of the settlement.
The houses outside the border of the settlement up along Kanage Street are now fenced with iron sheeting often with razor wire. The levels of security have been strengthened.
Settlement people could once cut down to the road through house yards. Now it is all blocked. Too many raskols used the tracks to steal and escape from the police.
The people are becoming broken up into us and them. Unfortunately in the squatter settlements, the us and them are all in together.
It is not a good feeling for a family man and his wife to feel they are going down in life as they approach old age. They have no land in the village and have to stay in the urban area with their children who will not be wage earners as they are unable to go to school.
The editorial of the Post Courier wrote about families squandering money and having to face the responsibility of paying school fees. Many people squander their money on rent that they still can not afford.
Yet the people of this settlement can look over to the freeway to watch long lines of hundreds of top line vehicles waiting in long lines to Erima roundabout to head up the Magi Highway. So that is where LNG and other sources of money have ended up.
It throws a new light on the massive misappropriation of funds in Government and business. This is not to justify. But we have to understand that some people have set up their own self help schemes. It is the quick and the dead.
Some are in poverty and just want their families to survive. Some are rich and just want to be very rich with all the trappings. PNG has no unemployment benefits. Some workers have no superannuation.
Point to ponder: A single room costs K300 a week. That is K600 a fortnight. Many workers receive K120 a fortnight. Food for the family and school fees are not possible.
There is no choice but to stay with other family or live in a squatter settlement. Parents must feel that their family is going downhill fast.
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