From the start, there were always more questions than answers about the Bermuda Homes for People project.

With the formal dissolution of the company having taken place, the questions just continue to mount.

On the surface, this seemed to be a terrific project. Clifford Schorer, the owner of the Wyndham Resort in Southampton, was its primary mover and had had experience with similar schemes in the US.

And he enlisted an impressive group of Bermudians with long records in public service to run the company, including former Permanent Secretary of the Environment Brian Rowlinson, former senior Government planner Aideen Ratteray-Pryse and Richard Winchell, who had moved from his post as principal curator of the Aquarium into international business some years earlier.

The scheme itself was promising. Using modern low cost materials and construction techniques, the shocking cost of construction in Bermuda would be cut. Selling half of the 198 homes at market prices would raise enough money to subsidise the sales of the other half to low income working families.

This would have helped to alleviate the housing shortage ? and would have created a neighbourhood of homeowners which would have been a truly diverse community which would have been neither a ghetto nor an exclusive gated community.

Government accepted the idea, and set aside land at Marginal Wharf in Southside for it, overriding plans already in the works from the Bermuda Land Development Company for the site.

Sometimes when things seem to be too good to be true, they are. Earlier this year, Mr. Schorer apparently pulled out, and landed BHP with a bill for his services of $700,000. Apparently that was enough to tilt the company?s finances into technical insolvency, and information received by this newspaper suggested that the margins on the project were already far too tight.

That was partly because the BLDC had begun to pile all kinds of expensive infrastructure schemes onto the project which had not been accounted for. And it is likely that there was a dispute about how much compensation the BLDC should receive for the land ? and who should pay for it.

Soon BHP was declared ?technically insolvent? and Government took over the scheme.

For whatever reason, Government decided to go ahead with the lottery for the 98 subsidised homes, and these were duly handed out at an Oscars-like ceremony.

Now, BHP is formally out and the few people who placed their money down for the market-value homes are getting their money back. Government is now committed to building the subsidised homes, but seemingly without the financing that the project would have received from the market-price homes.

So an $80 million project will now apparently be paid for by the taxpayer. Given that the 100 homes are being sold for $200,000, that leaves a $60 million deficit to be met.

At one point, Housing Minister Ashfield DeVent said banks and international companies would be assisting with the financing, but there?s been precious little heard about that since.

And even the BLDC?s role in the project is in doubt, since it says it has not yet agreed to take it over, Mr. DeVent?s claims to the contrary. So there are still more questions than answers about this project, which began with so much promise, almost all of it now ground into dust.