Estate upgrade plan gets nod

The City Council on Tuesday endorsed a plan to demolish Shauri Moyo Estate and build new houses.

A full council meeting resolved that Shauri Moyo would be a pilot project in a wider scheme to provide more housing to city residents.

“The housing units and surroundings were in a deplorable state such that any short-term remedial action would not have had any impact,” housing director Johnson Kariuki told the meeting.

The new houses will be built in empty spaces in the estate to accommodate the tenants as the old ones are brought down.

Deputy mayor George Aladwa welcomed the project but called for the involvement of residents.

“We must see the participation of the residents, especially in getting them alternative accommodation as the old building get demolished.”

The chairman of the housing committee, Mr Mwangi Njehia, also said the project would spread to other city estates.

The private sector-driven plan aims at replacing the 15,000 one-bedroom housing units. The estate will be turned into an upmarket area with amenities such as shopping malls and health centres serviced by dual carriageways.

Town Clerk Philip Kisia said earlier that the upgrading plan, already before the Cabinet, would increase the number of families housed in City Council units to 300,000.

Thousands

The plan is also expected to bring to the real estate market thousands of competitively priced housing units.

This will help tame the runaway pricing in recent years by taking care of the cost of land, said to be the biggest driver of pricing.

City Hall officials who submitted the plan to the Cabinet said 25 residential estates – including Makongeni, Shauri Moyo, Bahati, Mbotela, Jericho, Uhuru, Kaloleni, Ziwani and Kariokor would be demolished to create space for the new housing scheme.