Kingston, Jamaica — 1 March 2017
Kingston’s skyline is changing. Apartment towers are rising in Barbican, Liguanea, Manor Park, and Half-Way Tree. Residential streets that once consisted entirely of single-family homes are seeing planning applications for multi-unit developments. And a quiet but significant conflict is emerging between long-established residents who value the character of their neighbourhoods and a development sector that sees under-utilised urban land as the logical solution to a housing shortage that conventional suburban expansion cannot fully address.
The Logic of Density
The case for urban densification in Kingston and St Andrew is straightforward. Land in desirable urban locations is limited and expensive. Suburban expansion requires infrastructure investment in roads, drainage, water, and services that has historically been slow and expensive to deliver. The population seeking to live in or near the capital is growing. And the market is signalling its preferences clearly: apartments in Kingston’s established residential suburbs, particularly those priced between fifteen and thirty million dollars, are among the most consistently in-demand products in the Jamaican market. Building upward on existing urban land, rather than outward into peripheral areas, is both economically rational and potentially more sustainable in terms of infrastructure use and commuting patterns.
The Jamaica National Building Society’s conversion to a bank in this year marks a significant moment in the evolution of the mortgage landscape. JN Bank brings a new competitive dynamic to a market previously structured around the building societies and commercial banks, and signals an ambition to serve the growing urban apartment buyer segment with products tailored to that market. The emergence of new lenders and new mortgage products is part of what has made the urban apartment segment as active as it currently is.
The Resistance and What It Reflects
Not everyone in the affected communities welcomes the change. Havendale, Barbican, and other residential areas have seen organised opposition to specific development proposals that residents argue would change the character of their streets, overload drainage and road systems, and reduce the value and amenity of properties whose owners chose them precisely because of what they were. Some of those objections reflect legitimate planning concerns about infrastructure capacity. Others reflect a preference among existing residents for a kind of neighbourhood stability that development intrinsically disrupts. Both deserve to be taken seriously, because planning disputes that treat all resistance as obstructionism and all development as automatically beneficial tend to produce outcomes that serve neither communities nor the city well.
A City Under Pressure
Kingston needs more housing. It also needs planning frameworks that can distinguish between development that genuinely serves the city’s needs and development that simply extracts value from established neighbourhoods without commensurate investment in the infrastructure those neighbourhoods require. Getting that balance right, between the legitimate pressure to build and the legitimate interests of existing communities, is one of the defining urban planning challenges Jamaica faces as its capital city continues to grow and as the demand for urban living continues to outpace the formal housing supply designed to meet it.
Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com
Visit our YouTube Community ↗