Jamaica Built 40,000 Homes This Decade. Was It Enough?

Kingston, Jamaica — 1 September 2005

Jamaica’s housing sector delivered more than forty thousand homes in the decade between 2000 and 2010, a figure double the output of the 1960s and a reflection of sustained public investment, private development activity, and the joint venture model that brought the National Housing Trust and private developers together to build at a scale neither could achieve alone. That expansion is reshaping the residential geography of the island, extending the reach of formal housing into parishes and communities that had seen little new development in previous generations. But the decade’s building boom is also raising questions about who it is reaching, what happens after the headlines, and whether the communities being built will function as well as the houses being delivered.

The Joint Venture Model

The joint venture approach, in which the NHT provides land, financing, and loan offtake while private developers design, build, and market housing schemes, produced a wave of gated residential developments across St Catherine, St Andrew, and other parishes during the early 2000s. For the NHT, the model allowed it to expand supply faster than it could by developing directly. For private developers, it provided access to a large and creditworthy pool of NHT-backed buyers. The output was real: schemes in communities like Seville, Greater Portmore, and numerous parishes across the island added thousands of units to the island’s formal housing stock.

The model was not without its tensions. As developers and the NHT focused on schemes that were financially viable, the emphasis on two-bedroom solutions in gated communities displaced the earlier focus on starter homes and serviced lots for lower-income buyers. Operation PRIDE, which had been designed to address informal settlements and provide tenure security to those with the lowest incomes, had by 2005 largely stalled amid budget overruns and implementation failures. The building boom was producing homes, but not primarily for those who needed them most.

Infrastructure and the Urban Planning Problem

The urban planning decisions that created Greater Portmore in the 1990s as a dormitory community without nearby employment, requiring its residents to commute daily into Kingston, had not been fully learned from. New schemes in St Catherine and elsewhere were continuing to be developed in locations where residents would be heavily dependent on road links that were already stretched. Highway 2000, the landmark infrastructure investment of the Patterson years, was helping to manage the pressure on the Kingston-St Catherine corridor, but the concentration of new housing in areas without commensurate commercial, employment, and service infrastructure was creating communities that worked as addresses but struggled as places.

What a Decade of Building Reveals

The housing boom of the 2000s is a genuine achievement. Tens of thousands of Jamaican families have moved into formally constructed, title-bearing homes because of the investment made during this decade. That matters in human terms and in economic ones. But the decade also reveals the limits of a housing policy that measures success primarily in unit counts. Homes without services, without nearby employment, without inclusive design for those on the lowest incomes, and without sustained post-occupation management are not the complete answer to Jamaica’s housing challenge. The next decade of building will need to learn from both the achievements and the shortcomings of this one.

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