St Catherine: the engine room of NHT housing

Kingston, Jamaica, 30 August 2019

Ground was broken for a new $1.46 billion housing development in St Catherine, the latest phase of a growing cluster of National Housing Trust schemes in the parish that has become the engine room of Jamaican housing supply. The 110-unit Twickenham Glades project formed part of a programme that, that year, carried the largest planned expenditure in the Trust’s history. For a parish absorbing thousands of new homes, the groundbreaking was one marker in a sustained build-out reshaping where Jamaicans live.

St Catherine as the centre of gravity

The development added to thousands of solutions already delivered in St Catherine in the preceding years, with more in the pipeline at neighbouring sites. The concentration is no accident. The parish offers available land, proximity to Kingston, and the road and water infrastructure that large schemes require, making it the natural focus for an agency trying to deliver volume. The result has been a steady transformation of the Portmore and Spanish Town corridors into the country’s densest band of new housing.

The scale of ambition that year was considerable. The Trust set out a programme of expenditure described as its largest ever, aimed at initiating thousands of housing starts across the island and pressing toward a multi-year target of tens of thousands of solutions. Twickenham Glades was a single visible piece of a far larger plan.

What concentration brings, and costs

Building at scale in one parish has clear advantages. Shared infrastructure lowers the cost per unit, and clustering schemes allows services, drainage and community facilities to be planned together rather than piecemeal. For buyers, it means a supply of new homes within commuting distance of the capital’s jobs.

But concentration carries pressures too. Roads, water and schools must keep pace with the influx, and a parish absorbing so much growth risks strain on services if infrastructure lags behind housing. The quality of what is built also matters, a point that later experience at one of these very schemes would make uncomfortably clear when residents reported defects. Volume alone is not a measure of success.

The longer arc

Seen years later, the 2019 build-out in St Catherine reads as part of the ramp-up that would push the Trust’s annual output to record levels through the following years. The groundbreakings of that period laid the groundwork, literally, for the housing numbers the Government would later cite as historic. They also concentrated a great deal of the nation’s housing future in a single parish.

Dean Jones, founder of Jamaica Homes, said St Catherine’s emergence as the heart of new supply has reshaped the geography of where Jamaicans can afford to live. The challenge, he noted, is ensuring the infrastructure and build quality match the pace of the construction.

As the parish continues to absorb new schemes, the test is whether growth this concentrated can remain liveable. The homes are necessary and welcome, but a community is more than its housing count, and the lasting value of these developments will be judged by how well they are served and built, not merely how many were delivered.

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