NHDA purchases private land for housing development
Sri Lanka’s National Housing Development Authority (NHDA), faced with a scarcity of land and strict land market restrictions, is purchasing developed and undeveloped private land in rural and urban areas, for housing development to meet the shelter needs of middle income families.
The authority intends to buy vacant private lands ranging from over 40 perches to over one acre to build houses or sell it at concessionary terms and conditions to middle income earners to construct their own houses, a senior official of the NHDA told the Business Times.
With the state owning around 82 per cent of all land in Sri Lanka, the NHDA has to find suitable private land for housing development to fulfill the government’s vision to provide every family with adequate and affordable shelter by 2020, he added.The Government has already initiated the construction of low-income houses in Colombo under its Sustainable Township Programms.
The overall objective is to construct 100,000 housing units per annum nationwide until 2020, he disclosed.
In a newspaper advertisement the NHDA invited interested land owners who wish to sell their lands to forward the title deed and a copy of the plan along with a full detail of the relevant land to enable the authority to make arrangements to buy such lands.
“We will purchase these lands at market rates, but it should not be very much higher than the government assessment value,” the official said. He declined to give details on how many land parcels the authority intends buying or the financial allocations for this particular project. According to Finance Ministry sources, a sum of Rs.500 million has been allocated to double the housing construction programme undertaken by the authority for low income people.
But there was no financial provision for housing development for middle income earners, ministry sources revealed.