Montego Bay Needs Its Own Portmore as Housing Lags Behind Growth

Montego Bay, Jamaica, 22 April 2003 — Montego Bay’s ambitions as a world-class resort and business destination are being constrained by a shortage of housing that is visible not just in property prices but in the informal settlements that ring the city’s expanding commercial and tourism footprint. Job creation in the tourism sector and the growth of business process outsourcing activity are drawing workers to the Second City faster than the formal housing market can accommodate them, producing the same conditions that drove squatter settlement growth around Kingston in earlier decades.

Senior figures in Montego Bay’s development community have begun making the case for a housing investment programme on the scale of Greater Portmore, arguing that the city needs 30,000 or more new homes to meet the demand generated by its growing economy. The absence of affordable formal housing forces workers into informal settlements on steep hillsides and marginal land around the city’s perimeter, creating communities without adequate infrastructure and concentrating social pressures in areas that are physically and economically vulnerable.

Tourism and the Housing Gap

The relationship between tourism employment and the housing market is a specific feature of Montego Bay’s development challenge. Resort workers, hotel staff, and service industry employees who generate the economic activity on which the city’s prosperity depends often cannot afford to live within reasonable distance of where they work. The informal settlements that ring Montego Bay house a significant proportion of the tourism sector workforce. Those settlements lack the infrastructure, security, and stability that formal housing communities can provide, and the cost they impose on their residents, in commuting time, unreliable services, and physical risk, is not captured in tourism revenue statistics.

A Portmore-scale housing intervention for Montego Bay would require land, financing, infrastructure, and sustained political commitment over a decade or more. The NHT has the mandate and, if its resources are not diverted, the financial capacity to contribute significantly to such an effort. What is needed is a planning framework that identifies the land, a joint venture structure that engages private developers, and an infrastructure investment programme that prevents the mistakes of Portmore from being repeated in western Jamaica. The case for investment is compelling. Whether the institutional will to act on it is present is a different question.