Squatting in Jamaica is not only a problem for private landowners and church denominations. Jamaica Public Service and the National Water Commission have both been battling illegal occupation of their own infrastructure land, according to Gleaner reporting on the country’s broader squatting crisis, a dimension of the issue that rarely makes headlines the way evictions or land titling announcements do.
The pattern matters because utility land is functionally different from vacant private land. Settlements built too close to power infrastructure or water works create safety hazards for the settlers themselves, not just legal exposure for the utilities, and removal is complicated by the same twelve-year adverse possession clock that applies to any other occupied land in Jamaica.
Government’s response to squatting generally has leaned on a mix of regularisation and infrastructure requirements: newer foreign-funded tourism developments, including hotel construction sites, are now required to provide housing for staff during construction specifically to reduce the incentive for workers to establish informal settlements near a job site, a lesson drawn from earlier cases where migrant construction and hotel workers built makeshift housing on land they had no claim to.
The scale of the underlying problem makes utility-land squatting a persistent, low-visibility drain rather than a single crisis: an estimated 750,000 to 900,000 Jamaicans have lived in squatter or irregularly settled communities at various points, according to figures cited in Parliament, a population large enough that some settlement, inevitably, ends up on land utilities themselves are trying to protect.
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