After Irma and Maria: Jamaica Counts Its Blessings and Asks Hard Questions About Housing Resilience — Jamaica Homes Monthly Housing & Development Review, September 2017

Publication Date: 3 October 2017 | Coverage Period: 3 September – 2 October 2017 | Category: Monthly Review

September in Brief

• Jamaica survives Hurricanes Irma and Maria without direct hits; widespread relief across the island.
• Irma destroys an estimated 90% of structures in Barbuda and causes catastrophic damage across the Virgin Islands and St Martin.
• Hurricane Maria devastates Dominica and Puerto Rico weeks later; 25% of Dominica’s homes destroyed outright.
• Jamaica placed under hurricane warning for Irma on September 8; shelters activated, emergency protocols tested.
• ODPEM performance draws praise; debate opens on building codes and Caribbean-wide construction standards.
• Jamaica’s housing market resumes normal activity by late September; NHT programmes uninterrupted.

Jamaica’s September: From Fear to Relief

For Jamaica, September 2017 was a month that began in dread and ended in a relief so profound it has reshaped public conversation about the island’s vulnerability to natural disaster. When Hurricane Irma made landfall on Barbuda on 6 September as a Category 5 storm with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour — among the highest ever recorded in the Atlantic basin — the worst fears of a generation of Jamaicans seemed on the verge of realisation. Jamaica had been placed under a formal hurricane warning on 8 September, the first such alert in many years. Shelters were opened, emergency services placed on standby, and the government’s National Emergency Operations Centre activated its highest level of readiness.

In the event, Irma tracked north of Jamaica, passing at sufficient distance to spare the island its most destructive winds while still delivering heavy rainfall and some coastal flooding to northern parishes. The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) received high marks for its coordination, and the machinery of government — parish disaster committees, local shelters, emergency broadcast systems — functioned as intended. There were no fatalities attributable to Irma in Jamaica, and structural damage was limited.

Then Hurricane Maria arrived. Making landfall on Dominica on 18 September as a Category 5 storm and striking Puerto Rico on 20 September as a catastrophic Category 4, Maria inflicted a second hammer blow on a Caribbean region still reeling from Irma’s passage. Jamaica again escaped direct impact. The relief, while genuine, was tempered by the scale of the regional catastrophe unfolding around the island.

The Caribbean Housing Catastrophe

The housing destruction visited upon the eastern Caribbean by Irma and Maria is of a magnitude that demands sober accounting. In Barbuda — a coral limestone island of fewer than 2,000 residents — approximately 90 per cent of structures were reported damaged or destroyed by Irma. Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda announced that Barbuda was effectively rendered uninhabitable and ordered the evacuation of its entire population. The island’s housing stock, much of it constructed without reference to modern wind-resistance standards, simply disintegrated under 185-mile-per-hour winds.

In Dominica, a damage assessment conducted in the weeks following Maria found that 85 per cent of the island’s houses sustained damage and over 25 per cent were completely destroyed. For an island nation of approximately 71,000 people, the implications — for shelter, for public finances, for the entire development trajectory of the country — are almost incalculable. Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit described Dominica as having been set back twenty years.

Puerto Rico presents the starkest single case. Maria made landfall on the US territory on 20 September, destroying an estimated 166,000 residential buildings and leaving approximately 3.4 million residents without power in what is shaping up as one of the costliest natural disasters in American history. The island’s housing stock — already under strain from a severe fiscal crisis — will require reconstruction investment of a scale that will take years to mobilise.

In the British Virgin Islands and US Virgin Islands, the damage was similarly severe. The former saw a large portion of its housing destroyed; the latter suffered comparable losses. St Martin, devastated by Irma, saw large sections of both the French and Dutch sides reduced to rubble.

Jamaica’s Housing Sector: Hard Questions

The events of September have prompted Jamaica to ask a question that housing professionals, engineers and disaster risk specialists have raised repeatedly over the decades: how would Jamaica’s own housing stock perform under a direct Category 5 hurricane strike? The answer, according to building professionals consulted this month, is deeply uncomfortable.

Jamaica’s residential building inventory is highly heterogeneous. Reinforced concrete structures in upper-income areas of Kingston and in the more affluent resort corridors of St James are relatively well-placed to withstand major hurricane winds. But a substantial portion of the island’s housing — particularly in rural parishes and informal urban settlements — relies on zinc roofing, timber framing and unreinforced masonry construction that would fare poorly under the wind speeds Irma generated.

The Building Act of 2017, passed by Parliament earlier this year, introduced strengthened standards requiring new residential construction to be designed to withstand Category 5 wind loads. The legislation represents genuine progress. But enforcement on the ground remains the sector’s acknowledged Achilles heel. Municipal building inspectors are under-resourced; illegal construction is commonplace; and the vast existing stock of non-compliant housing cannot be retroactively rebuilt by legislative fiat alone.

Government Policy: NHT’s Emergency Role

The National Housing Trust’s mandate has come under renewed scrutiny in the aftermath of Irma and Maria. The Trust’s primary function — providing affordable mortgage finance to contributors — is a market function. But the NHT also has a statutory role in supporting the government’s emergency housing response in the event of a disaster. With the eastern Caribbean now presenting a massive reconstruction need, the question of whether the NHT can or should play a regional role — through technical assistance, joint ventures or emergency financing — is being asked in some quarters.

Domestically, the Trust’s development calendar has continued without interruption. Joint venture schemes in St Catherine, St James and Trelawny are progressing toward completion. The government has reiterated its target of addressing the island’s estimated 100,000-plus unit housing deficit, though the fiscal headroom to dramatically accelerate supply remains limited under the IMF Extended Fund Facility to which Jamaica remains committed.

Insurance and Reinsurance

The catastrophic losses in the Caribbean will reverberate through the global insurance and reinsurance markets in ways that will ultimately be felt in Jamaica’s own property insurance premiums. The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) triggered payouts to affected governments almost immediately, demonstrating the value of parametric insurance mechanisms in the immediate post-disaster phase. But the scale of insured losses across the region — preliminary estimates run to tens of billions of US dollars — will drive reinsurance premium increases at the January renewal season that will flow through to Jamaican policyholders in 2018.

Jamaican homeowners are chronically underinsured. Surveys conducted in recent years suggest that a significant proportion of residential properties — particularly in lower-income segments — carry no building insurance at all. The events of September underscore the financial ruin that uninsured homeowners face when a major storm strikes.

Construction and Building Codes Debate

Architects, engineers and urban planners across the Caribbean are engaged in an urgent debate about the relationship between building standards and housing survival rates. The evidence from Barbuda, Dominica and Puerto Rico is instructive: in each case, the housing stock most likely to have survived consisted of reinforced concrete structures built to more modern specifications. Traditional timber and lightweight steel construction fared predictably worse.

For Jamaica, the lesson is clear: the Building Act of 2017 must be backed by consistent, well-resourced enforcement. Engineers and advocacy groups are calling for a renewed focus on compliance, for homeowner education programmes on hurricane-resistant construction, and for a national retrofit programme to bring the most vulnerable existing housing stock to minimum resilience standards.

Regional Context: Reconstruction Ahead

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has convened emergency meetings to coordinate regional response to the Irma and Maria disaster. Jamaica, as one of the region’s larger and more economically stable member states, is expected to play a significant role in the humanitarian and reconstruction response. The government has already dispatched aid to affected territories. The longer arc of reconstruction — rebuilding Barbuda from near-zero, restoring Dominica’s housing stock, supporting Puerto Rico’s recovery — will be the defining challenge of Caribbean development for years to come.

Housing Market Conditions

Jamaica’s residential property market, after a September of collective anxiety, returned to more normal conditions as the month closed. The hurricane season extends through November, and the unusual activity of 2017 — Irma and Maria following one after another in the space of two weeks — has left property market participants cautious about the remaining weeks of the season. That said, underlying demand fundamentals have not changed: the BOJ policy rate remains at 3.50 per cent, mortgage rates are stable, NHT programmes are active, and the economy continues to grow at a modest but respectable pace.

Looking Ahead

With the hurricane season peak now past and the most immediate dangers receding, Jamaica’s housing sector can look toward the final quarter of 2017 with cautious optimism. The hard questions raised by Irma and Maria — about building codes, enforcement, insurance penetration and disaster financing — will not disappear. They deserve, and in the coming months may finally receive, the sustained political and professional attention they have long warranted. The Caribbean’s housing catastrophe is, for Jamaica, both a warning and an instruction.

This review covers the period 3 September to 2 October 2017. Market data, interest rates and development information are drawn from publicly available sources current as of the date of publication.

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