It would take a pretty insensitive person not to share in the joy the new residents of Bermuda Housing Corporation homes at Orange Hole in Southside and at Sandhurst in St. George?s showed late last week when they opened the doors of their new homes.

Given the desperate lack of affordable housing on the Island, any increase in supply is welcome.

And the BHC has created such low expectations for itself from the general public that when it completes any homes it is cause for celebration.

The reality is that the Orange Hole and Sandhurst projects put little more than a dent in demand, and they have been 18 months or more in the making. This too was a cause for celebration for the BHC (the projects were finished on time), but again, this must surely be because the BHC has taken so much longer to complete other projects. It is likely that the private sector could and has done much better.

Taken against the bigger picture, it is at best a start. Housing Minister Ashfield DeVent said the completion of the projects showed there was light at the end of a ?very dark? tunnel. If so, it is the barest glimmer of light; in all 23 homes have been added to the Island?s housing stock.

Bigger solutions seem some time away. Plans for additional homes in Prospect and at Perimeter Lane in Pembroke have come up against residents? opposition while the biggest plan of all, the Bermuda Homes for People, seems to be permanently stalled.

Undeterred, Mr. DeVent said last week that Government plans to provide more than 300 affordable rental units over the next 30 months.

This has been made possible, he said, by the formation of the Government?s Housing Initiative Committee which conducted an Islandwide housing study earlier this year.

Details on just how this will be done remained unexplained. Just where these homes will go, how they will be built and how they will be paid for was not revealed. Instead, Mr. DeVent fell back on an older statement: the solutions will be ?holistic? and ?this means embracing ideas that may be unique?. The latter statement, of course, has meant forcing neighbourhoods to take more homes when they say they are already overcrowded.

It has also meant importing prefabricated homes without having identified a location for them. They now sit, well, somewhere. Government won?t say where they are being stored.

The other major obstacle is cost. With construction costs running at $300 a square foot, if each apartment was an average of 1,000 square feet, this would end up costing $90 million at today?s costs.

The BHC has gained some credibility by completing

Orange Hole and Sandhurst on time. For that, at least, it has restored some of its own credibility. It is unlikely it will be able to come through with its much bigger promise.