This is the first in a three-part series on housing. It describes the scale of the housing crisis.

Bermuda’s housing crisis is not a future threat. It is a present catastrophe — measurable, documented and worsening with every passing year. For those who prefer to believe it is confined to a small sliver of vulnerable society, the numbers have become impossible to dismiss.

According to the Home Annual Report 2025, the number of homeless or facing homelessness population in Bermuda stood at 1,331 people as at December 31, 2025. That is up from 1,101 in 2024, 811 in 2023 and 555 in 2021. In four years, the number has more than doubled. Net new cases in 2025 alone amounted to 230 individuals. As Home's chief executive, Denise Carey, writes in the report: “In the past 44 months, I have witnessed 22 members of our community perish without ever receiving the housing security every Bermudian resident deserves. We cannot call that acceptable.”

These are not abstract statistics. They represent 170 people sleeping rough on streets and in public spaces, 130 individuals under active threat of eviction, 188 living in insecure accommodation with friends or family, 125 people in homes formally deemed unfit for habitation, and 89 living in temporary non-conventional structures including shacks, makeshift shelters and cars.

Home is careful to note that these numbers represent only those in confirmed direct or indirect contact with the organisation. The hidden homeless, those temporarily couch-surfing or quietly enduring inadequate conditions without accessing services, push the true figure far higher.

The Bermuda Chamber of Commerce's deep-dive housing presentation places this human suffering in its structural context. As of May 2025, Bermuda has 32,484 total residential dwelling units, a net increase of only 614 units since 2016, a growth rate of only 1.9 per cent over nine years. Against a 2016 Census baseline of 28,192 occupied households, that supply increment is woefully inadequate.

The chamber's research team calculated that to house a “utopian” target population of 70,000 people, a figure derived from the Government's own ministerial statements, Bermuda needed approximately 8,418 additional working people to sustain its ageing population. It would require about 33,654 households, implying the need for approximately 5,462 new dwellings beyond 2016 levels.

Even setting the population growth target aside entirely, the numbers are damning. The chamber projects that the average household size has declined to approximately 2.08 persons per household in 2025 (from 2.26 in 2016), driven by ageing demographics, rising rates of single-person and single-parent households (now 44.5 per cent of all households, up from 36.4 per cent in 1991), work-from-home practices converting bedrooms into offices, and decades of declining birthrates.

The chamber's central insight is one that most political debate ignores entirely: “Even if our population were to remain steady over a ten-year period, we would need additional households due to a reduction in household size per dwelling.” You can have a shrinking population and a worsening housing shortage simultaneously. Bermuda is living that contradiction right now.

The construction pipeline provides no comfort. Building permits are, as the chamber documents, at historically low levels, approximately five per month. New unit completions average approximately seven a month, or 84 a year. At that rate, it would take 30 years to build 2,500 units, and that assumes every completed unit is immediately available to Bermudians at an affordable price, which the evidence flatly contradicts. The Government has accepted there is a tremendous backlog and has hired a consultancy firm to assist, ironically from overseas.

The chamber also identifies that construction replacement costs now exceed market values by more than 20 per cent in many cases, meaning private developers have almost no financial incentive to build new affordable stock. The chamber is blunt: “The easy answer to the housing problem is to build more units. However, cost to build/renovate is very high, bank lending is tight and building is not occurring fast enough.”

The banking sector provides a further grim data point. At the peak of the post-2008 correction, approximately 12 per cent of Bermuda's mortgages were subject to some form of restructuring, totalling nearly $391 million in troubled debt. The system is burdened, not buoyant.

Meanwhile, real estate sales activity has contracted to fewer than 200 transactions a year in each of the past three years. Buyers cannot buy, builders cannot build and renters cannot find a unit. In this frozen market, the median cost of a Bermuda home has reached $1 million.

I have been writing about this crisis with increasing urgency for years, with my first call for emergency housing repurposing of Bishop Spencer School in 2008 in the Bermuda Sun. In my March 2025 column in The Royal Gazette, I warned that housing “cannot be examined in a simple vacuum” and that “we need to have a totally different holistic look at the entire matter”.

This crisis has demographic, legislative, planning and financial dimensions, and treating it as simply a “build more units” question misses its depth entirely. The chamber's presentation, which runs to nearly 100 slides of granular data, arrives at the same conclusion: “It is unsustainable to build our way out of the situation. We need to resolve the underlying issues first. The problems are multidimensional.”

It is in that multidimensional spirit that I write this three-piece opinion, not to score political points for their own sake but to assess which proposed solutions are scaled to meet the crisis as the data defines it, and which represent the kind of high-energy, low-detail announcements that have left Bermuda's housing wait-lists largely unchanged since they first appeared in 2000.

What is striking, and what must be stated clearly, is that the Progressive Labour Party government has had more than two decades in which to address a crisis that was already documented in the headlines of the mid-1990s. The chamber noted that housing-related headlines date back to “1996, ’97, ’98, 2000 and all the way up to today” and that “the problem is not new”.

The question before Bermuda is not simply what the Government is promising. It is why those promises, after decades of PLP rule, have produced a waiting list of 375 families at the Bermuda Housing Corporation and 1,331 people in identified states of homelessness.

Ms Carey, the CEO of Home, perhaps captures the stakes most concisely: “If John Lewis asked me, ‘What does Bermuda need?’ I would answer without hesitation, ‘Homeownership — secure, attainable and generational’.”

The data says we are nowhere near that vision. The question is whether the plans on the table are sufficient to get us there.

• Michael Fahy is the Shadow Minister of Housing and Municipalities and Home Affairs, and the One Bermuda Party MP for Pembroke South West