It’s funny how some things come full circle.

About eight years ago, when the United Bermuda Party was in power, the Bermuda Land Development Company unveiled plans to sell around 40 properties at Southside to first time homeowners.

The goal was pretty simple. Selling the homes would help the pressed rental sector because the homes the buyers were vacating would now be available to other tenants. The money raised from the sales would then go to fund further development of housing and other properties on the former Baselands.

That would have seemed to be a win-win situation. But when the Progressive Labour Party came to power, they junked the plan, halving the number of properties available for sale and dedicating the rest to low cost housing. Fast forward to the 2003 general election and the UBP, now in Opposition, proposed building 100 homes at Tudor Hill in Southampton. These would have been built using low cost materials and sold for around $200,000 using lower than market financing to make them affordable to people shut out of the housing market.

They would also have been fairly small at about 800 square feet, prompting Sen. David Burch, the once and future Housing Minister to mockingly say they were “little boxes” and would not accommodate a king-size bed, which apparently was a major drawback in his eyes for people trying to buy homes.

The PLP’s election platform, by contrast, devoted one line to the housing crisis. It said: “The Bermuda Housing Corporation is currently exploring the feasibility of various forms of non-traditional building methods, as well as non-traditional complexes.”

Now in 2006, the Housing Ministry, once again under Sen. Burch, seems to be finally moving forward with a wide variety of initiatives, as promised in the 2005 Throne Speech to build 300 new homes in 30 months.

The majority of these include homes that are being built in order for them to be sold. They include the rump of the Bermuda Homes for People project, which is no longer self-funding as originally envisaged, but it is being financed at least in part by the sale of homes at Southside — the same idea that was trashed by the Government seven years ago.

Further funding will come from the sale of 54 homes being built for sale at between $450,000 to $550,00 at Southside in a public-private partnership that will see Government sell land to a private developer who will then sell the homes to first-time homeowners at under-market prices, in a deal similar to the one struck at Loughlands in Paget.

Again, the Southside land sale will help to subsidise the Harbour View development planned for Southside.

In the case of both the Southside development and Loughlands, Government is approving special development orders to enable the construction to take place. The Loughlands order was finalised on Friday, although the plans themselves have yet to reach the Planning Department.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with private-public partnerships or with special development orders being made to enable housing construction to take place.

But there is plenty of irony that seven years after the PLP came to power in which the housing crisis has been allowed to go from serious to catastrophic, the Government is finally recognising that there is a crisis and that it is taking ideas that it either rejected before or mocked in order to solve it.