Business View Caribbean - December 2015 53
In 1962, Act No. 903 of the Virgin Islands Legislature
established the agency as the Virgin Islands Housing
Authority.
VIHA is empowered with the responsibility for plan-
ning, financing, constructing, maintaining, and man-
aging public housing developments on the islands of
St. Croix and St.Thomas. Its mission statement is as
follows: “To create vibrant, dynamic, sustainable com-
munities so families can evolve economically, and to
improve lives and strengthen communities through
quality, safe, and affordable housing and by providing
a myriad of services to empower public housing resi-
dents.”
Robert Graham, VIHA’s Managing Director, talks about
the agency’s past, present, and future initiatives: “In
the 1950s, the Territory sought to reduce rural slums
and, in that process, to build public housing to provide
affordable housing for residents and reduce the reli-
ance on slum dwellings. So it began a series of acqui-
sitions and development of properties and requested
HUD (The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban De-
velopment) to designate them as public housing, so
that they would be eligible for operating subsidies as
well as capital improvement subsidies.”
By the early 1970s, Graham says that the number of
VIHA units had reached a total of 4,127 apartments
in approximately 35 developments across the two is-
lands. “That was the largest number of units that the
Housing Authority owned and managed,” he contin-
ues. “Subsequently, in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, a se-
ries of hurricanes destroyed a great deal of property in
the Territory, including some public housing develop-
ments. And so, the Housing Authority had to demolish
a number of them. And that took the number down to
approximately 3,300 units – about 25 percent of the
inventory. So, currently, we manage 3,287 units in 27
developments.”
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
The Virgin Islands Housing Authority
WHAT:
A public housing corporation that is re-
sponsible for planning, constructing, and main-
taining public housing in the U.S. Virgin Islands
WHERE:
St. Thomas and St. John, U.S. V.I.
WEBSITE
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