1,505 New Housing Solutions Planned for Kingston and St. Andrew as PM Pushes Urban Density

Kingston, Jamaica — 24 August 2022

The Prime Minister has announced 1,505 new housing solutions earmarked for the Corporate Area, unveiled during a handover ceremony for completed units at the Majesty Gardens development in St. Andrew. The announcement targets three specific sites: Fore Shore Estate with 230 units, Maxfield Park with 210 units, and Howard Avenue Apartments with 280 units, with the remainder dispersed across additional Corporate Area locations. The three headline projects alone represent nearly 720 new urban addresses in Kingston and St. Andrew.

The announcement comes with an explicit prime ministerial directive: the NHT should build more houses in the Corporate Area. That instruction carries weight. It signals a deliberate pivot toward urban densification at a moment when the conventional logic of housing policy might have pointed outward, toward cheaper land in peripheral parishes.

Three Projects, Three Stories

Fore Shore Estate, with its harbour proximity in the lower Kingston waterfront zone, represents the kind of brownfield or underutilised land that holds significant potential for urban residential development. Two hundred and thirty units on this corridor, if well-designed, would contribute to the gradual rehabilitation of an area that has historically underperformed its locational advantages.

Maxfield Park, with 210 units, places formal residential supply inside one of Kingston’s most densely settled and historically underinvested communities. Formal NHT housing in Maxfield Park is not simply a housing project. It is an investment in the social and economic rehabilitation of a community that has borne more than its share of Kingston’s urban challenges.

Howard Avenue in St. Andrew, targeted at 280 studio apartments, speaks to a different buyer: the young professional, the recent graduate, the single-income earner who wants urban convenience but cannot yet afford a two-bedroom unit. Studios in this location, served by the commercial and institutional infrastructure of the St. Andrew corridor, would fill a genuine gap in the NHT’s product mix for the Corporate Area.

The Case for Urban Housing Investment

Kingston and St. Andrew have historically received less NHT housing investment per capita than their population and economic contribution would warrant. The political logic of dispersing housing across all parishes is understandable, but the economic and social logic often favours concentration in urban centres where jobs, services, and infrastructure already exist.

A family housed in Kingston does not need a car to get to work. A family housed in an outlying parish scheme often does. The hidden cost of transport in Jamaica’s housing affordability calculation is significant, and it falls almost entirely on the lower-income households that NHT housing is designed to serve.

“The Corporate Area pipeline is exactly what the NHT should be building,” said Dean Jones, Managing Director of Jamaica Homes. “Fore Shore, Maxfield, Howard Avenue: these are locations where housing investment generates outsized social returns. Urban land is expensive, but the total cost of living is often lower than peripheral schemes when you factor in transport.”

The Completion Timeline

The three headline projects were indicated for completion in 2023. That timeline, announced in August 2022, is ambitious given Jamaica’s persistent construction execution challenges. The Howard Avenue ground-breaking for 248 studio apartments had already taken place, giving that scheme the clearest path to delivery. Fore Shore and Maxfield Park face the more complex urban construction environment, with all the logistical complications that infill development in a dense city brings.

Kingston’s housing pipeline is growing. The 1,505-solution announcement, combined with the private sector vertical developments proceeding across New Kingston and the waterfront, suggests that the capital’s residential supply is finally being taken seriously after years of neglect. Whether the completions follow the announcements is the question that 2023 will answer.

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