Investment Returns to the Shore: Q1 2004 and the Boom’s Second Wave Begins

Briefing

• Major construction financing announcements for north coast resort developments in Q1 2004.
• Jamaica Tourist Board reported growing interest from US and European resort operators.
• NEPA EIA pipeline expanding as new applications accompanied financing announcements.
• Coastal access advocates warned boom conditions would repeat access failures of the 1990s.
• Community groups sought early engagement with developers before construction began.

The return of significant resort development investment to Jamaica’s coast in 2004 was neither coincidental nor surprising. The conditions that had produced the previous wave of north coast development in the 1980s and 1990s — strong American tourism demand, Jamaica’s established reputation as a beach destination, competitive land prices relative to other Caribbean markets, and government incentive packages for tourism investment — were all present. What had changed was the scale of the projects being contemplated: the new wave was characterised by larger properties than its predecessors, with more rooms, more extensive beach frontage, and more ambitious facility programmes. The all-inclusive megaresort concept that had been pioneered in Jamaica in the 1980s was being refined and scaled up.

The Jamaica Tourist Board‘s reports of growing investor interest were corroborated by the NEPA application pipeline, which was expanding to include applications from properties whose scale had not been seen in the previous development cycle. The planning system was being asked to process applications for properties with several hundred rooms, private beaches of several hundred metres, marina facilities, golf courses, and the full range of amenities that the megaresort format offered. Each of these applications triggered a full EIA process; the process was managing to cope, but only at the cost of the processing timelines that the applicants were already finding frustrating.

The Early Warning

The coastal access advocates who warned in early 2004 that boom conditions would repeat the access failures of the 1990s were working from direct evidence: they had documented the access failures of the previous cycle and they could see that the institutional arrangements that had produced those failures — the same approvals conditions, the same enforcement mechanism, the same political context — were intact and unchanged. The warning was not a prediction that required new evidence to substantiate; it was a statement that the conditions for a repeat were in place and that a repeat was therefore the most likely outcome unless something specifically changed to prevent it. Nothing specifically changed.

Community Engagement Efforts

The community groups that sought early engagement with developers in 2004, before construction began, were attempting to address a structural problem in the development approvals process: by the time a development had its approvals and was moving to construction, the formal consultation process was over and the opportunities for community input into the design and siting of access corridors, community benefit agreements, and construction management arrangements had passed. Early engagement, before approvals rather than after, offered the best opportunity for communities to shape outcomes. Some developers responded positively to early engagement requests; others did not. The correlation between developer responsiveness to early engagement and subsequent access corridor compliance was not systematically studied, but advocates’ experience suggested it was positive.

Related: Property Market Analysis | Jamaica Tourist Board | NEPA Jamaica

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