Column: Fahy On Housing, Bermuda & More
[Opinion column written by Michael Fahy]
There is a version of the Bermuda Affordable Housing Strategy 2025–2035 that I could support without reservation. It would take the genuinely good elements of this document, the demographic analysis, the modular construction pivot, the derelict stock programme and the vacancy tax concept, and add to them the private-sector activation engine, the immigration-housing linkage, the legislative urgency and the financing architecture that the current draft lacks.
Let me explain what that looks like in practice.
The single most important thing this document does not do is reconnect housing and population policy as two sides of the same equation. The Chamber of Commerce said it plainly that the housing crisis and the population crisis are joined at the hip. The OBA has said this for years. It is not a controversial position. It is arithmetic.
When the PLP introduced term limits in the early 2000s, longer-term residents who had been renting three and four-bedroom family homes left the island and were replaced by short-stay workers, many of them single or married without children, who moved directly into competition with Bermudians for one and two-bedroom units. That policy choice structurally depleted the very segment of the rental market that Bermudians most need. The digital nomad programme, well-intentioned in isolation, had the identical effect. Further, as our population ages, with seniors increasingly moving from family homes into the one and two-bedroom market, that competition deepens every single year.
A housing strategy that does not acknowledge this dynamic is working with a broken model. To build 950 to 1,350 units while simultaneously replenishing immigration demand for the same unit typologies, without any regulatory adjustment, is to fill a bath without fixing the drain.
The solution is not to restrict immigration. The opposite is true. The Chamber’s research estimated that Bermuda requires approximately 8,418 additional working-age people to sustain our ageing population and fiscal base. A larger, skilled and stable population makes Bermuda more prosperous for everyone. Empty houses do not pay rent to Bermudian landlords. Empty restaurant tables do not keep Bermudian waitstaff employed. The Fiscal Responsibility Panel put it clearly, immigrants and returning Bermudians with the right skills will help to create jobs, not displace them.
What needs to change is the structure, not the volume. We should be incentivising the return and retention of longer-term, family-forming residents who will live in larger units and contribute across all segments of the housing market, not a revolving succession of short-stay workers who remain in permanent competition in the most constrained segment of the market.
That means clear pathways to permanent residency. It means a guest worker framework that rewards long-term commitment rather than churning term-limited licences. It means building the population that will fund the hospitals, pension contributions and school places that an ageing Bermudian society will need, and it means building enough housing to accommodate that population when they arrive.
Now to how we actually build it.
The strategy’s instinct to go modular and precast is somewhat correct. At $500 to $700 per square foot against $800 to $1,000 for traditional masonry, modular systems offer Bermuda its only realistic path to cost-competitive affordable construction. The Government’s customs duty reduction on construction materials to 10 percent, a policy the OBA pressed for and eventually received, is a genuine step. It should be pushed further to zero, and the foreign currency purchase tax on construction financing should be eliminated entirely.
However, reducing construction costs without addressing the fundamental disincentive for private developers is only half the equation. Construction replacement costs exceed market values by more than 20 percent. That means a developer who builds affordable housing is, by definition, building at a loss relative to the underlying asset value. No commercial actor will consistently operate at a loss unless something changes the underlying equation.
The answer is a Housing Investment Act, the residential equivalent of the Tourism Incentive Act. Provide time-bound land tax exemptions, duty relief and density bonuses to developers who build in Hamilton and other designated zones, require a minimum 30 percent affordable component, and tie the relief to ten-year minimum rental terms on the affordable units. This is not a subsidy. It is the correction of an incentive structure that currently prices private investment out of the affordable market entirely.
On the derelict stock question, the strategy’s Repair-to-Rent programme and Land Bank model are sound in concept. But I want to be clear about the compulsory acquisition powers proposed in this document. Before we begin acquiring properties from Bermudians, we should have exhausted every less coercive option first. I said this in March 2026, and I will say it again. Before we run off and acquire homes already owned by Bermudians to then sell or lease to other Bermudians, let us look again at selling or offering long-term leases over government property and incentivise the private sector to build on it.
The Government owns land. It owns buildings. It owns properties in St. George’s multiple schools and institutional sites across multiple parishes. Before compulsory acquisition legislation is enacted, publish an honest and complete accounting of every government-owned asset with residential conversion potential, and offer long-term leases to private developers and housing cooperatives on commercially reasonable terms. That costs almost nothing and could deliver supply in months rather than years. Empty schools should top this list!
The probate issue deserves one final emphasis. The Chamber identified approximately 3,678 dwellings effectively unaccounted for in the gap between assessment roll numbers and occupied households. A substantial portion of Bermuda’s 214 uninhabitable properties are inheritance disputes waiting to be resolved. Faster processing, simplified mediation and clear legal guidance for co-ownership disputes could return hundreds of units to the market at negligible public cost. This should be a 2026 legislative priority, full stop.
What the strategy ultimately needs, and what Bermuda ultimately deserves, is the honest acknowledgment that the housing crisis is the accumulated consequence of specific policy choices: term limits, planning conservatism, Landlord-Tenant Act neglect and two decades of BHC under-investment. Fixing it requires the political courage to reverse those choices, not merely the institutional ambition to manage their consequences.
HOME’s Executive Director Denise Carey described the goal with exactly the simplicity it deserves, namely homeownership that is secure, attainable and generational.
That is the Bermuda I want to build. It is the Bermuda this strategy claims to be building. The gap between the claim and the construction timeline is the only political question that matters right now.
We know what to do. The question that remains unanswered, after thirty years of housing headlines, after twenty-one years of PLP governance and after the publication of this 66-page strategy, is whether anyone in authority is prepared to actually do it.
- Michael Fahy is the Shadow Minister of Economy, Labour & Housing, and the OBA MP for Pembroke South West. He can be reached at mfahy@oba.bm or opedfahy@gmail.com
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