New Government, Old Coast: Q1 2017 and the JLP’s First Full Year of Coastal Development Decisions

Briefing

• The JLP government completed its first full year in office in February 2017, having won the February 2016 election.
• Tourism Minister announced a target of 5 million annual visitors by 2021.
• A NEPA report documented continued mangrove loss at five monitored coastal sites.
• Community groups in Portland organised a new coalition to defend coastal access in the parish.
• Coastal real estate values on the north coast rose by double digits year-on-year.

The JLP government that took office after the February 2016 general election had been in power for a year when Q1 2017 opened, and its priorities on the coast were by then established. Tourism investment was the engine; the Tourism Minister’s public pronouncements consistently framed Jamaica’s coastal development in terms of room supply targets, arrival projections, and foreign exchange earnings. The 5 million annual visitor target announced in early 2017 — almost double the then-current level of 2.4 million stopover arrivals — implied a level of hotel capacity expansion that would require the transformation of substantial additional sections of Jamaica’s coast.

The environmental framework within which that transformation would take place was the same one that had been managing Jamaica’s coast for decades. NEPA‘s report on mangrove monitoring, released in January 2017, documented continued loss at five coastal sites that the agency had been tracking since the early 2000s. The losses were not dramatic — no single site had been catastrophically cleared in the quarter — but the trend was consistent: a few hundred square metres here, a degraded margin there, the slow attrition of a habitat system under chronic multiple pressures. Cumulative loss over the period since 2006 at these sites was in the range of several additional hundred hectares, adding to the 770-plus hectares lost in the decade before that.

Portland’s New Coalition

In Portland parish, community groups that had previously organised around specific site-by-site threats consolidated into a broader coalition in Q1 2017. The Portland Coastal Access Alliance, as it came to be known, brought together residents from Winnifred Beach, the communities around Boston Bay, the fishing villages of the eastern tip, and heritage advocates concerned about the Blue Lagoon and other natural sites in the parish. The consolidation was a response to the recognition that defending each site separately, against developers who could bring resources to each individual battle, was less effective than maintaining a coordinated parish-wide capacity for organised advocacy.

The Real Estate Signal

Coastal real estate valuation data for Q1 2017 showed year-on-year price increases at double-digit rates along the north coast parishes most active in hotel development. The increases reflected both genuine demand from the tourism investment boom and the anticipatory behaviour of landowners and speculators who had concluded that the direction of government policy meant continued development approval was likely. The price signal was being read correctly in terms of policy direction; what it was also doing was making the communities that lived on the coast as residents rather than investors progressively less able to afford to remain there.

Related: Property Market Analysis | Latest Jamaica News

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