The government of Suriname has repeatedly emphasized the importance it attaches to improving
the living conditions and social wellbeing of its citizenry through housing and community
development programs (IDB, 2006, p. 26). Since the mid-1980s, the decline in real incomes,
together with high mortgage interest rates, land market bottlenecks, and high building costs, have
made housing unaffordable to all but the most affluent households. The average housing
production was around one-half of household formation, which is estimated at 1,350 per annum
nationwide. Government-assisted housing construction came to a halt until it was recently
restarted. As a result large a pent-up demand for new units accumulated over the years. In
addition, the lack of maintenance has resulted in deterioration of the development standards of
the housing stock. In order to understand the housing policy outcomes in Suriname there are two
basic aspects we need to take into account: the adequate supply of affordable houses, and the
ownership structure.
There is a significant shortage of affordable houses for low income and low-middle
income groups (the target group of this paper), mostly because financing costs for developers
and buyers alike are high. Suriname’s housing industry caters mostly to high middle and upperincome
buyers, who account for 20% of the population, while only 34% of the planned subsidies
for home rehabilitation and expansion were allocated to lower income groups (IDB, 2006).
Approximately 40.1 percent of the population of Suriname lives in multidimensional poverty
2
(OPHI, 2016), which could explain why beneficiaries are too poor to pay for land and a
mortgage for a newly built house at the same time (Mc Hardy & Donovan, 2016).
According to Torgersen’s findings on housing regimes, a constant balancing of power
between interest group takes place in the interlocked relationship between the state activities, the
housing market and the family’s role in social provision. This is so because housing, to a far
greater degree than other social products such as education, health care and social security is a
market product. Because housing straddles both state and market, it is probable that vested
market interests are more prominent in housing than in other welfare sectors (Esping-Andersen,
1990, p. 21).
In 2012 the Parliament approved the Housing Plan 2012-2017, a second, more elaborate
attempt towards housing policy reform, than the 1997 Action plan. This involves a phased out
roll back of traditional government intervention in the housing market, towards public private
partnerships. Instead of providing social housing for rental or purchase, the government would
focus more on institutional aspects such as legal reforms, and the provision of suitable land for
building (Cabinet of the President, 2012). The construction and rental of social housing will be
the task of the private sector. Analyzing Suriname’s housing regime becomes much more
interesting with the entrance of China’s Broad Homes Industrial International into the housing
market since 2015, a manufacturer of prefabricated buildings.