By Horace Palacio: Ask your grandfather how he got his house.
He will tell you a story that sounds like a fable now. A public officer’s salary, or a cane farmer’s crop money. A lot bought for a few hundred dollars, sometimes leased from government for less. Then the Belizean way, the foundation one year, the walls when the money came, the roof after the next harvest, the family moving in before the paint. By forty five he owned it outright. No landlord. No mortgage hanging over his grave. His own piece of Belize under his feet.
Now ask a thirty year old Belizean, working full time, when she expects to own a home.
Watch her laugh. It is not a happy laugh.
Between those two Belizeans, one dream quietly died. Today I want to hold the autopsy, because home ownership for the ordinary Belizean is becoming a thing of the past, and nobody in power seems willing to say it out loud.
Start with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the murder weapon.
The median Belizean worker earns about one thousand dollars a month. A full time minimum wage worker, about 975. Now price the dream. A simple residential lot on the edge of Belmopan, our most affordable major town, runs sixty to one hundred thousand Belize dollars. The lot alone. Five to eight years of that worker’s entire income, every cent, unfed and unhoused, just for the dirt. A modest family home in that same affordable town can reach three hundred thousand. That is twenty five years of total median income. And before any bank will talk, it wants a down payment, tens of thousands saved, by a person whose landlord already takes the biggest bite of every month.
The numbers do not say difficult. The numbers say impossible. So how did the possible become impossible in one generation? Five ways.
First, the land learned to speak US dollars while the paycheck kept speaking Belize dollars. Our coast and cayes now trade in a currency our workers do not earn. Bare lots on Ambergris start around fifty thousand US. Condos run from three hundred and fifty thousand US toward a million and beyond. To a foreign retiree, that is a bargain paragraph in a magazine. To the Belizean waiter serving him ceviche, it is several lifetimes of wages. Two economies now occupy one country, and only one of them can afford the country.
Second, we never built a fence. Belize is one of the few nations on earth where a foreigner enjoys every property right a citizen does, no restrictions, freehold title, beachfront, whole islands, owned outright with a checkbook. Even mighty Mexico fences its coastline, requiring foreigners to hold coastal land through bank trusts. Little Belize, with four hundred thousand souls, hands over the title deed to anyone, for anything, anywhere. We did not lose our land in a war. We listed it.
Third, we made hoarding land nearly free. Property tax here is famously tiny, assessed far below market value, a few hundred dollars a year even on expensive homes. Wonderful for the buyer. Fatal for the young family. Because when holding land costs nothing, land is held. Walk any town and count the empty overgrown lots, owned by someone, somewhere, waiting for the price to rise while a generation waits for a place to live. Cheap to hoard means expensive to own.
Fourth, the title labyrinth. Thousands of Belizeans occupy land they cannot prove is theirs, leases never converted, surveys never done, files sleeping for years in the Lands Department. And a paper problem becomes a poverty problem, because without title there is no collateral, without collateral no loan, without a loan no house. The system that should plant owners instead grows squatters on their own soil.
Fifth, an import nation builds at import prices. Every board, every bag of cement, every sheet of zinc carries freight and duty before the first nail is driven. The same trade dependence I have written about all year does not just empty the shop shelf. It prices the roof off the Belizean dream.
And here is the wound beneath the wound. A home was never just shelter. It is the only wealth machine the ordinary family ever owns. It is the collateral that starts the small business, the security that survives the job loss, the inheritance that gives the next generation a head start. Kill home ownership and you have not just created renters. You have cut the one rope by which working families climb. Rent, remember, is the landlord’s tax on the landless, and we are raising the first generation of Belizeans sentenced to pay it for life. A man who can never own a piece of his country will always be a tenant in it. I have written before about Belizeans becoming strangers in their own economy. This is where it becomes literal.
Now, the turn. Because I refuse to write obituaries without asking whether the patient must actually die.
Here is the absurdity that should make you angry. Belize is nearly nine thousand square miles holding barely four hundred and twenty thousand people. We are one of the emptiest countries in this hemisphere. There is no shortage of land in Belize. There is a shortage of will. Our scarcity is man made, and what men made, men can unmake.
Title the people. Clear the Lands Department backlog, convert the old leases, digitize the files, and put real title in Belizean hands, because a title is the seed of everything.
Open new ground. Roads, water, and light turn bush into neighborhoods. Government’s job is not to build every house. It is to make land reachable and buildable.
Tax the hoard. Raise the holding cost on idle urban land so speculation pays rent to the nation, and watch the empty lots come to market.
Build a fence, even a low one. Reserve zones where only Belizeans may buy. Price the foreign purchase of residential land through higher duties, and let that revenue fund Belizean first homes. Every serious country protects some soil for its own children.
Finance the builder, not just the buyer. Long term, low rate mortgages through our development finance and credit unions, and small staged loans that match how Belizeans actually build, foundation first, roof when ready. Our grandparents’ method was not poverty. It was genius. Formalize it.
And to the young Belizean reading this, your part has not changed. Land before car. Pool with family the way our people always did. Start ugly, start small, but start, because the ones who own this country will be the ones who decide it.
Your grandfather owned his home because the door was open and he walked through it. His grandchildren rent because the door was quietly sold.
It is not too late to buy back the door. But the hour is very, very late.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
The post Home ownership in Belize is becoming a thing of the past, and we watched it happen appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Horace Palacio: Ask your grandfather how he got his house. He will tell you a story that sounds like a fable now. A public officer’s salary, or a cane farmer’s crop money. A lot bought for a few hundred dollars, sometimes leased from government for less. Then the Belizean way, the foundation one year,
The post Home ownership in Belize is becoming a thing of the past, and we watched it happen appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
