New Opposition Leader Wayne Furbert said his party had a plan to build Bermudians homes for $160,000 to $200,000.

Mr. Furbert said it was no problem to build homes for $175 to $200 per square foot when Government tax benefits were taken into account.

?Government has quite a lot of land to do something with. Supply is affecting the prices. Once we get supply going the price will drop.?

Mr. Furbert was speaking during a question and answer session at a United Bermuda Party Town Hall meeting in Warwick on Wednesday.

He said rentable three-bedroom homes for $1,200 to $1,300 a month were feasible.

?Government has the ability to borrow at lower interest rates than yourselves and pass that savings on to the customers.?

But Mr. Furbert warned constituents not to expect 40ft by 40ft bedrooms, Jacuzzis or cedar-gilded fire-places.

?You are talking $160,000 to $200,000 it would cost Government to build,? he said.

The Opposition had built homes in the past, he said, and had a plan in place for this Government to follow.

?All you had to do was put a tick next to our plan from 2003 and those houses would have been built,? the Opposition Leader quipped. ?That was the difference between getting a house and not getting a house.?

He was hopeful Government would throw money at housing in the Budget.

Shadow Housing Minister Sen. Kim Swan said he would start a Housing Alliance Team if the UBP was elected.

The Team would be chaired by Warwick candidate Wayne Scott because Sen. Swan did not want to be the voice of housing.

?I want Wayne Scott to be more up-to-date on housing than I am so he can bring his message of housing to the constituency of Warwick,? he said.

Six other UBP MPs, Senators and Candidates will make up the Team, he said, including Gina Spence Farmer, Jon Brunson, John Barritt, Suzann Roberts-Holshouser, Keith Young (who is running in Pembroke) and Kenneth Bascome (who will run in St. George?s North).

?We are looking to gather some more people on that,? Sen. Swan said. ?We want to get it from the ground up.?

However, the team will be made up of more than politicians as there will also be a Technical Committee of people in the housing field ? like developers or realtors, he said.

?At the last election the Shadow Minister of Housing produced a plan. We produced a blueprint of some houses. You know what the PLP said about those houses?? Sen. Swan asked. ?One person called them a shoebox! We would have built those. They laughed at them. And then they pirated that plan and tried to turn it into a Southside development that went belly up.

?The unfortunate thing is for two successive elections ? the first of which I think we needed some time to take a chill pill and reflect ? but the second of which I feel the citizens of Bermuda have been robbed because the Government have been operating without a plan, they are sort of winging it,? he said. ?Going at it willy-nilly.?

Sen. Swan said the Ministry of Housing had seen five Ministers in the last seven years which he called shuffling the deck. He said not everyone in Bermuda will ever own a home but it was a real difficulty now just finding a place to rent.

Even home-owners ? whose property values have shot through the roof ? cannot sell their homes and afford to buy them back.

We heard daily stories about single-mothers with children affected by the housing crisis, he said.

?As we go forward between today and the next election we are going to see a lot of proposals, we are going to see a lot of plans, see a lot of money spent, but I am going to tell you what you haven?t seen is the solution to some of these problems that should have been dealt with sometime ago,? he said.

Government should not be judged by promises but actions, he said.

?There are also people living illegally in Club Med. Were they living illegally in Club Med last week? Yes. Were they living illegally in Club Med about six months ago? Yes,? he said. ?Thirty percent of the population in this country are poor or near poor ? 12 percent are poor.?