Catherine Estates Returns: Can Jamaica Finally Build at Scale?

Kingston, Jamaica — 1 September 2019

Catherine Estates in Bernard Lodge, St Catherine, is to be revisited and transformed into one of the largest housing developments in the parish since Greater Portmore was built in the early 1990s. The Housing Agency of Jamaica, which entered into a joint venture agreement for the project nearly a decade ago without following through to completion, has returned to the development with new ambition and a revised partnership structure. The project’s scale, potentially thousands of units on former agricultural land close to the industrial corridor and commuter routes, positions it as a significant test of whether Jamaica’s housing development machinery can deliver at the kind of volume the country’s deficit demands.

Learning from Greater Portmore

Greater Portmore’s development in the mid-1990s provides the nearest precedent for a project of this kind in St Catherine. That scheme, which nearly doubled Portmore’s population and created housing for tens of thousands of families within commuting distance of Kingston, demonstrated both the potential and the pitfalls of large-scale public housing development. The potential was clear: it produced real homes for real families who could not have accessed ownership in urban Kingston. The pitfalls were equally clear: a dormitory community built without the employment, commercial, and social infrastructure to serve the population it was designed to house, generating daily commutes that placed pressure on road links and imposed time and financial costs on residents.

Bernard Lodge’s relative proximity to the industrial areas of Hayes and the expanding commercial developments along the St Catherine corridor offers the possibility of a better balance between residential and economic infrastructure than Greater Portmore achieved. Highway 2000, which has reduced commute times significantly compared with the pre-highway era, makes the area more viable as a location for households whose employment is distributed across the Kingston-St Catherine region. The question is whether the development’s planning will actively incorporate employment and service provision, or whether it will repeat the pattern of building homes first and worrying about everything else later.

The Financing Equation

A development of the scale being discussed at Catherine Estates requires a financing structure that goes beyond what the HAJ can assemble from its own resources. The involvement of international development finance, local commercial partners, and NHT loan offtake for buyers is likely to be part of any workable financing package. Pricing the units at levels accessible to those the HAJ is intended to serve, while producing returns sufficient to attract and retain private development partners, is the perennial tension in public-private housing development and one that the Bernard Lodge project will need to resolve if it is to proceed at scale rather than stall again as the original venture did.