‘Lack of workers delaying housing repairs, projects’

The Northern Marianas Housing Corp. has been facing issues with renovations and upkeep of housing units under their programs and believes that they are all tied to the lack of construction laborers on island.

According to Northern Marianas Housing Corp. director Jesse Palacios, their two main issues with providing enough housing for the CNMI community is tied to the lack of construction laborers on island.

“Both building a home and renting out homes are our biggest problems and they’re both tied to construction,” he said.

Palacios explained that NMHC has issues with the loan they are given by the U.S Housing and Urban Development, which is too low and that there aren’t that many inhabitable rental properties to begin with. Both issues could be solved if there were enough laborers, Palacios added.

“A lot of properties are still damaged and they don’t have workers to fix these homes, so they’re not available for rent. Same…for new construction. The prices are too low for the contractors to take on the project and those are our two main issues for housing,” he said.

Palacios said that construction workers are the wheel for housing to efficiently run in the CNMI and both the economy and the community suffer because this resource has now become scarce.

“That’s what makes the wheels turn for housing here. We need them because they’re the ones that build housing for homeowners; they’re the ones who fix rental housing. Everything revolves around them. This really hurts the economy as well as the community with housing,” he said.

Palacios also mentions that community projects have also been harder to complete because of the lack of construction laborers.

“Even if we have the funding, who is going to build these projects? They’re the ones who construct all our community projects,” he said.

To address the issue, Palacios said that they are working on increasing loan amounts in order for the remaining contractors to take on NMHC projects.

“We’re trying to address that by increasing our loan amounts but we just need the data from them. We cant just tell a federal agency that we want the loan amounts to increase. We need to prove that, so that’s why we gathered contractors together so that they can submit proposals based on the scope of work that we provide them,” he said.