Michael Fahy: “You cannot achieve affordable housing without an integrated, adequately financed delivery system that does not depend on annual budget negotiations.”

Statement by Michael Fahy, OBP MP for Constituency 20, Pembroke South West and Shadow Minister of Economy, Labour & Housing:

Let me pose a question that Bermuda’s political class has been avoiding for 30 years. Why does a government that has held power for the better part of two-and-a-half decades need a 10-year plan to address a housing crisis that was generating headlines before the turn of the millennium?

The plan is addressing 2025 to 2035—yet wasn’t published until mid 2026.

I have been writing about this crisis since 2008, when I first called for Bishop Spencer School to be repurposed as emergency housing in the now-defunct Bermuda Sun. The Chamber of Commerce has documented that housing-related headlines date back to 1996, 1997, 1998 and continue to today.

The Bermuda Housing Corporation waitlist has existed in one form or another since at least 2000. And yet, as of December 31, 2025, 1,331 Bermudians were identified as homeless or facing homelessness. That number has more than doubled in four years.

The Bermuda Affordable Housing Strategy 2025–2035 is, on its face, a serious document. The demographic analysis is broadly sound. The identification of household size decline as an independent driver of demand, meaning you can have a shrinking population and a worsening housing shortage simultaneously, reflects precisely the structural reality I have been outlining in this space for the past two years. The modular and precast construction pivot has some merit, as does the proposal for a Housing Authority, a dedicated Department of Housing, annual performance dashboards and fast-track planning approvals.

So why am I not standing to applaud? Because Bermuda has been here before. We have had housing strategies, housing task forces, housing committees, housing press conferences and housing throne speech promises. What we have not had is delivery at the scale and pace the crisis demands. The question before us is not whether this strategy says the right things. The question is whether the same government that presided over the crisis for 21 years can now produce the solution.

Consider the numbers. The strategy targets 94 to 134 affordable units per year. The entire island currently completes approximately 84 units per year across all categories. We are being asked to believe that a government which has managed 84 completions per year will more than double its affordable output, on top of existing market-rate activity, through the same institutional structures, the same planning department and the same BHC that has been nibbling at the edges of this problem for a generation.

I will take that claim seriously when I see the financing architecture to support it.

The $418.5 million, 10-year programme is described with enough precision to imply it has been properly costed. But there is no financing plan. There is no debt management framework. There is no specified mechanism for the Affordable Housing Fund, no published borrowing limits, no agreement with the private sector on public-private partnership terms. The Chamber of Commerce was clear. Construction replacement costs exceed market value by more than 20 percent, meaning private developers have almost no financial incentive to build affordable stock. The strategy describes that structural problem without resolving it.

Compare this to the Singapore Housing Development Board model the strategy references. The SHDB did not simply announce a target and create an authority. It built integrated financing through the Central Provident Fund, mandatory employer and employee contributions that created a dedicated housing investment pool. It anchored construction innovation through sustained state investment in prefabrication capacity. It treated public housing as a primary economic indicator, not a welfare residual. The result was mass homeownership at 90 percent of the population across all income groups.

Bermuda cannot replicate Singapore at scale. But the principle transfers directly. You cannot achieve affordable housing without an integrated, adequately financed delivery system that does not depend on annual budget negotiations. This strategy does not give us that system. It gives us a plan to build one eventually.

The Government’s response to these concerns will, predictably, be that the OBA did not build affordable housing when it was in power. Let me address that directly. The OBA inherited a government with no plan to service its debt, an annual deficit exceeding $400 million and a financial system that was borrowing money to pay interest on existing obligations. The housing crisis was already three administrations deep in the making before the OBA took office, and the structural causes, which included term limits-driven demographic shifts in the rental market, planning laws that discouraged density, a Landlord-Tenant Act that punished investment and a BHC operating without modernised legislative powers, were all inherited from the PLP’s earlier period. The OBA’s record of fiscal stabilisation is what created the headroom this strategy now proposes to spend.

What does progress actually look like? It looks like 50 confirmed units completed or under construction in the 2025-2026 fiscal year, against a Phase I target of 310 units by 2028. Fifty actual against 310 needed in three years is not a criticism of the construction teams working on those projects. It is a measurement of the distance between the ambition declared in this document and the institutional capacity currently available to deliver it. If Phase I is to succeed, the planning fast-track must be operational before the end of 2025, not aspirational. The Housing Authority must be constituted and funded in 2026, not proposed for it. The Landlord-Tenant Act amendments must be before the Legislature by the end of 2026, not the end of 2030.

HOME’s Executive Director Denise Carey has seen 22 members of our community perish without ever receiving the housing security they deserved over the past 44 months. Momentum, she has written, is not the same as transformation. That sentence should be printed at the top of every Housing Authority meeting agenda, because what Bermuda needs now is not another strategy. It needs the delivery that every previous strategy promised and failed to provide.

I said earlier this year that we need to measure twice and cut once. This strategy has measured. The question is whether this Government will cut.

Editor’s note: Part two of this two-part commentary will be posted tomorrow, May 25.