It is time to address squatting, Montego Bay hotelier and businessman Kerr-Jarrett told a Gleaner Editors’ Forum, reviving a proposal he first put forward in 2000 while president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce: use National Housing Trust employer contributions to regularise informal settlements, install basic infrastructure, and transfer the land to residents for the cost of that infrastructure plus an administration fee.
Fifteen years on, the proposal remains only partly adopted, some zinc fencing has been replaced with concrete walls and drainage improved in places, but the underlying land tenure question is largely unresolved. Kerr-Jarrett’s argument for why it matters goes beyond housing quality: unless you get people living in a more humane and civilised environment, you are not going to be able to fight crime, he said. Crime thrives in chaos.
The mechanism he proposes is specific: give residents a title, proper roads, a formal address, then bring them onto the tax roll. You put them on the government payroll for taxes and start to formalise the economy, then they are going to now use the legal means to enforce their tenancy, he argued, framing formal land tenure as something that changes incentives, not just living conditions.
Thousands came to Montego Bay for work, Kerr-Jarrett noted, but the housing was never built to match, which is why the settlements exist in the first place. His proposal treats that as the real problem to solve, not the squatting itself, since regularising land tenure without addressing the underlying housing shortfall would just relocate the same gap somewhere else.
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