“We Are Not Squatters”: A St Andrew Community Pushes Back on Its Own Regularisation

• Government targeted 1,000 households for regularisation
• Sandy Park residents rejected being labelled informal
• Roughly 700 identified squatter settlements exist islandwide
• An estimated 20% of Jamaicans live in them

Government announced aggressive steps to acquire properties and regularise close to 1,000 households in Kingston, St Andrew and St James, Minister without Portfolio Everald Warmington said, part of yet another road map to address the roughly 700 informal settlements the Squatter Management Unit has identified spread across all 14 parishes, home to an estimated 20 percent of Jamaica’s population.

The announcement landed badly in at least one targeted community. Residents of Sandy Park, St Andrew, dubbed an informal community by government as it moved to acquire and regularise the area, pushed back directly on the label itself, telling a visiting Sunday Gleaner reporter that they rejected being classified as squatters at all, a distinction that matters legally and financially: regularisation assumes an informal, undocumented occupation in need of formal titling, while residents asserting an existing, if perhaps imperfectly documented, claim to their land are contesting the premise the entire programme is built on.

The tension is not unique to Sandy Park. Informal settlements, the Squatter Management Unit has noted, are often melting pots of Jamaica’s most sinister social, political and economic ills, and hotbeds for crime, a characterisation government uses to justify intervention, but one residents in a specific, named community can reasonably experience as stigmatising, especially when their own account of how they came to occupy the land differs from the government’s informal classification.

That friction, between a top-down regularisation programme aimed at closing a real, well-documented national gap, and residents on the ground who dispute the premise their own community is being regularised under, is a recurring feature of Jamaica’s approach to informal settlements rather than a one-off dispute, and it complicates the straightforward story that regularisation is simply a benefit government is offering communities that would obviously want it.

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