Director of Lakeside Estate, Salah Kwaku Kalmoni has called on the government of the day to introduce financial policies to make owning a home easier and reasonably priced.
On his accord, the interest rate in Ghana is too high and needs to be reduced to help more Ghanaians join the league of home owners. “The interest rate in Ghana is too high. It is around 30 percent and needs to go down.”
He admitted that the government of the day is taking active steps to subsidize interest rates to about 12 percent especially for people who want to own homes “and if it is dropped even further, more people can join in the ownership of homes. We need to democratize home ownership in Ghana and to do so we need to make them more affordable. After that we need to change people’s concept of a house.”
He disclosed that the Ghana Real Estates Development Association (GREDA) about 10 years ago conducted a research on what Ghanaians define as a house. “We asked architects, engineers and GREDA developers and this is the cultural definition from Ghana. A house must have one bedroom and a living space. The living space must have an open kitchen, washroom, and must be 45 square meters or more and the cost must be between Ghc150,000 and Ghc600,000.”
The businessman described the definition as a practical one but admitted not every Ghanaian can achieve this until government introduces subsidies for home ownership.
During a discussion on the Happy Development Dialogue series on the ‘Epa Hoa Daben’ political talk show on the topic, ‘Affordable Housing in Ghana, a Reality or a Mirage’, he disclosed what accounts for the high pricing of their homes.
“We, the developers at GREDA put together our own infrastructure from scratch. When I say infrastructure I mean we have to put up the roads, gutters, electricity, transformers and water distribution system and that costs for us from Ghc50,000 to Ghc100,000. So before you say jack you’ve already spent this amount.”
The need to provide adequate and equitable housing has remained a major priority of every government. The 2010 Population and Housing census indicates that Ghana is facing an acute housing problem with housing deficit of over 1.5 million units in 2000 and over 2 million. The increasing housing delivery deficit is due to the high population growth rate, urbanization and less supply of housing units to meet the growing demand for housing.
According to the 2021 PHC report, “The 2021 PHC is the first time that data was collected on all structures regardless of use. Previous censuses only collected information on structures used for residential purposes. The 2010 PHC recorded 3.4 structures for residential use, which is 2.5 million less the 5.9 counted in 2021”.